i debated whether to be That Person because i love aunt ursula with all of my heart and soul and mind and i am delighted by this loving post, but also: one of the most brilliant things about her was that she was not always right.
if you read a wide variety of her work over the years, it becomes clear very quickly that she got things wrong. it becomes just as clear that she never stopped learning. and when she learned something new, she changed her mind. often in her essays, she will state this explicitly: “i know i said for decades that i was right not to use gender-neutral pronouns in the left hand of darkness, but now i see that i was completely wrong and i wish i had,” etc. but you can even see it in her fiction--ursula of the 1970s could never have written tehanu, for instance, because her understanding of feminism was so different by the time she did write it in 1990.
i haven’t done this, but i am confident that if you read everything she wrote (or at least her major works) chronologically, you would have the most amazing view of the trajectory of a mind in development, a mind profoundly affected by changing conversations in feminism and anthropology (among other fields)(you can truly trace the unfolding of second wave feminism and then critiques of it through her work especially). a mind that never stopped learning, adjusting for new information and new perspectives, and freely admitted to past wrongdoings when they became clear to her.
and this is extraordinary enough that i want to point it out.
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
