A tribute to women’s spirit

Reading the article on Charlotte Grimshaw’s memoir (“The unauthorised version”, April 3) brings to mind other talented female writers whose boundaries were infiltrated by fathers, and some of them by male lovers and hospital psychiatrists at various points in their lives. To name a few: Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame and Robin Hyde. That these women, whose lives involved mental illness, abuse, self-harm and sometimes suicide, managed to leave behind major literary scholarship is a tribute to women’s spirit. Grimshaw is to be commended for carrying this forward.

Glennys Adams

(Waiheke Island)

Taking on CK Stead. How challenging is that. Charlotte, I applaud thee.

Stephen Phillips

(Lower Hutt)

The main impression I got from the article was that Grimshaw doesn’t understand it was a different world when she was a child, and how ordinary her parenting and childhood were.

Does she not realise that what she appears to think are unusual family failings were, in fact, common and often expected of families – the disciplinarian and dominant head-of-the-family father, the deferential mother who learnt during childhood to keep her emotions under tight control, respecting the expectations of the day that certain things were kept under wraps? Families who weren’t like this were the exception. I know. I was there.

As for adolescence, today we know so much