Ursula K. Le Guin was a celebrated and prolific American author, spanning many literary genres for six decades, first winning acclaim in fantasy fiction, most notably her Earthsea ‘high fantasy’ series, and also in science fiction. Both had been a male enclave until her arrival, garnering much praise and many prizes.
She was generous to her predecessors and peers, whilst calling out their misogyny. She deplored all literary siloes, aka ‘genres’, and gained notoriety far and wide for her outspokenness on many subjects, not least feminism. She wrote twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories (an exemplar in each form), eleven volumes of poetry and five essay collections, including literary criticism – even thirteen children’s books.
The first section of this book is a collection of her talks, essays and ‘occasional pieces’, the next a collection of introductions she was asked to write for other authors’ books, some were reprints of classic sci-fi books, Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells and others. The final section is a scintillating collection of her book reviews. In every piece, her penetrating eye and her broad range of interests becomes clear. Sometimes her style is deeply serious and analytical, other times lampooning, having fun. Always interesting. Always telling it how she sees it – saw it.
It’s a wonderful resource through which to broaden any reader’s mind and to widen the scope and range of authors and subject matters they could explore.
I bought the newly republished edition after hearing extracts of the book’s first essay read aloud by Kate DiCamillo, a best-selling American children’s author, to whom the essay had been an inspiration in her career. The Operating Instructions was originally a talk given in 2002. Le Guin argues that human imagination ‘is the single most useful tool mankind possesses.’ She felt that for too long our imagination had been sorely overshadowed and undervalued by the greater prominence given to our reasoning faculties, in an overly-literalised world. She links imagination to literacy and from there to storytelling. She feared that already many only called upon their imagination if the TV broke down and their literacy only for reading operating instructions. (Do we even read them now?!)
She insists that ‘Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making’ – least of all, she says, in the publishing industry, a trend she railed against. It is ‘an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.’ She argues that words – in our best literary forms – exercise, educate and hone our imagination. Thus we need literacy. Ever an outlier within the literary world, whether books were printed matter or electronic, it didn’t matter to her. ‘Words are what matter,’ she concludes, asserting that, ‘The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting.’
In ‘On Serious Literature’ (2007) she calls out snobbery amongst the literati. Reacting against a dismissive reviewer who had referred to genre fiction as a decaying corpse abandoned in a shallow grave by writers of serious fiction, she writes a comic gothic scene in which the undead corpse of genre fiction haunts a reader, who can’t find her copy of Ulysses to defend herself! All she has is her copy of a Philip Roth novel propping up her reading lamp. But even raising that totem to ward off the spectre of genre fiction cannot save her. ‘She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta again.’
In ‘What Women Know’ (2010) she asks ‘What do we learn from women?’ and her first provisional answer is, ‘…we learn to be human.’ We do so from stories, so often read or told to us in childhood by women, and counterpoints how ‘women transmit the individual [the family] stories [whilst] men transmit the public history’, juxtaposing the private and public realms and how male and female teachings differ. ‘But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?’ I get what she’s saying but would quibble over grown up and thinking men. I can think of one notable exception to both epithets who lives in a white house. One of too, too many men.
Here she is in the first words of her short piece, How to Read a Poem: ‘How to read a poem is aloud.’
‘Living in a Work of Art’ is her homage to how the design of her Maybeck-designed family home, the Schneider house, first awoke her artistic sensibilities. Bernard Maybeck was a renowned American architect, most known for his domestic architecture, in which the interaction of the house and its inhabitants was crucial to its design. She says he was a visionary with a distinctive style, although outshone by Frank Lloyd Wright et al.
Of her home she writes, ‘If I recall my childhood, I recall that house. It is where everything happened. It is where I happened… and the space it allowed me to happen in was truly extraordinary [-] It was unusually beautiful.” She writes of its aesthetics, muses lyrically about the imprint of beauty upon the developing moral character, saddened that so few have the privilege to live within and surrounded by beauty and order. She concludes: ‘Writing this, I wonder if much of my understanding of what a novel ought to be was taught to me, ultimately, by living in that house. If so, perhaps all my life I have been trying to rebuild it around me out of words.’
In her sometimes acerbic, often humorous and always perceptive book reviews, you are never in doubt of what Le Guin likes or dislikes in another author’s novel. She generally balances any dislikes with elements she can admire, whether in the dialogue, plotting, boldness of scope and so on. She read broadly and intelligently across genres (that word again), cultures and periods. It’s an eclectic range of authors: Margaret Atwood to Alan Garner, Tove Jannsen to Yann Martell, Salman Rushdie to José Saramago and Jeanette Winterson and many others.
Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin (2025) [October 1929 – 2018]
© Kit Pearce