I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I don't think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the 'Comedy Central Roasts' for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.
With 'Suffragette,' I felt that a female writer would be good, and considering the subject matter, who would be better to write the script than Abi Morgan? She was the first choice, and she happens to be a woman.
Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.
The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world.
Some of the writers I've praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.
Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them.
I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.
It's sad when a woman writing fantasy in the United States in the 1970s has less actual feminist cred than Sir Walter Scott.
I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.