The #HNS Devon Chapter had another good meeting last Thursday. The usual topics recurred, agents and publishers among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was some talk of the ‘woke’ publisher who insisted on the replacement of \u2018girl\u2019 by \u2018young woman\u2019, despite the appropriateness of the former in the context. Some of the readership would be offended, even outraged, otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the advantages of self-publishing is that I do not have to bow down before such pressure. If some people do not wish to read my work because I am insufficiently woke, I can live with that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have two young women in Sudden Deaths, both around sixteen or seventeen, so just about qualifying for that term in my eyes. One of them is just about as independent as it was possible to be at that time and my image of her is as a role model for any young woman. If anything she is a bit too good to be true: I am having difficulty finding flaws in her character to make her a bit more realistic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other is much more typical of the era. She has a (over-?) protective father and is quite restricted in her life generally. She herself is happy not to be interacting with others, particularly men – she had a bad experience previously. What should our protagonists do to help her with that? Should they, and we, take a 21st Century view on these issues, or a 17th Century one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is another female character, Elizabeth Lilburne, in her thirties, who is a strongly political advocate for women’s rights and the right to vote for everyone (well almost everyone, obviously not servants and vagrants). In many ways she is more typical of a late 20th Century activist than some of the current crop, and certainly not typical of 17th Century women – at least not as they are portrayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was, of course, not someone I could invent, being entirely real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The #HNS Devon Chapter had another good meeting last Thursday. The usual topics recurred, agents and publishers among them. There was some talk of the ‘woke’ publisher who insisted on the replacement of \u2018girl\u2019 by \u2018young woman\u2019, despite the appropriateness of the former in the context. Some of the readership would be offended, even outraged, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}