Anamika
TENSE PAST, TENSE PRESENT: WOMEN WRITING IN ENGLISH by Joel Knortti Stree, Kolkata, 2004, 235 pp., 450.00
March 2004, volume 28, No 3

The universe in a basekt: that’s what one would love to call this beautifully done up anthology of interviews, snippets, snapshots, chit-chat, profiles, psychic flow charts of seven Indo-English writers of eminence: Shashi Deshpande, Shama Futehally, Gita Hariharan, Anuradha Marwah Roy, Mina Singh, Lakshmi Kannan and Anna Sujatha Mathai. It is good to see the new crop of sensitized men venturing to sensitize the not yet sensitized or the half-sensitized, if you may. The half-curious, half-awake and half-hearted appraisals of Indian English writing in general and women’s writing in particular have been intelligently deconstructed. This is an honest endeavour indeed, to take travels, meet women authors in person, choose representative pages from their work and ask the right kind of questions to draw the best out of them.

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