Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976) marks an important milestone in Atwood’s literary representation of the woman artist. While later novels such as Cat’s Eye (1988) and The Blind Assassin (2001) return to this key interest in the life of the female artist, Lady Oracle is the novel most concerned with the woman writer at work, in particular focusing on the relationship between the woman writer and the Gothic genre. The protagonist of the novel, Joan Foster, undergoes a series of transformations in the course of the narrative, constantly reinventing her personal identity and her identity as a writer. The novel begins with Joan hiding out in a remote Italian village, reflecting on having just faked h

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Published 25 October 2006

Citation: McWilliams, Ellen. "Lady Oracle". The Literary Encyclopedia. 25 October 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4169, accessed 9 February 2010.]