Disastrous Synthesis of Desire and Duty in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters

Abstract

The new series--Studies in Women Writers in English--is a grateful acknowledgment of the contribution and public recognition of the emerging voice of women in the arena of literature during the last few centuries, and especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Women writers across the globe have made their distinctive mark, with their own perception of life--be it feminine, or feminist or female. The present volume, the fifth in the series, introduces critique of work by women writers; it bears evidence to the growing critical attention towards authors writing outside the mainstream, in America, Canada, and especially in India. The eighteen essays included in this fifth volume of the series cover a wide spectrum of women writers across space and time. The women writers discussed in this volume include one from Britain, i.e., Mary Shelley, one from America, i.e., Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate for literature in 1993, one from Canada, i.e., Margaret Laurence, and a host of Indian writers, from an early pioneer like Krupabai Satthianadan to the partition novelist Bapsi Sidwa, as well as contemporary avant-gardes like Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Shobhaa De, Manju Kapur, and Arundhati Roy as well as the émigré Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee. Since most of the authors discussed in these articles are prescribed in the English syllabus in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find them extremely useful, and the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.