Poet, fiction writer, literary critic, and essayist. A passionately political writer, Atwood has in interviews resisted narrow labeling as a feminist, primarily because of her deep distrust of categorization and her concern about the limitations of language as well as her insistence on the variety of women and feminisms. But she believes absolutely in the rights of women and in her central project of telling women’s stories and uncovering the ways in which culture and discourse construct social identity and gender. Atwood’s early poetry and novels, including The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle , explore the construction of femininity as the insidious division of the female subject self into object and image. Employing characteristic satire and verbal irony Atwood creates “every-women,” ordinary protagonists whose entrapment in the ideology of their commercial, patriarchal societies is representative. Atwood writes prose with a poet’s sensitivity to linguistic meaning, and carefully…