Witches, Wives and Dragons: The Evolution of the Women in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea--an Overview‪.‬

EARLY IN A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, the first book of Ursula K. Le Guin's highly regarded Earthsea fantasy series, readers are told: "There is a saying on Gont, Weak as woman's magic, and there is another saying, Wicked as woman's magic" (5). These are curious declarations from an author who is internationally known for her explorations of gender politics and her critique of patriarchal social arrangements. In a world imagined and developed by a feminist writer, how is it that the magic of women is weak or wicked? Who are the women of Earthsea? The Earthsea books were written over a period of thirty-three years. The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, was published in 1968, and the last book, The Other Wind, was published in 2001. There is an eighteen-year gap between what the author once considered to be the concluding book of a trilogy, The Farthest Shore, and a fourth book Tehanu, which she subtitled The Last Book of Earthsea. The fourth book was apparently prompted by Le Guin's desire to further explore the life of the character Tenar, the female protagonist from the second book in the series, The Tombs of Atuan. Le Guin admits, in the foreword to the fifth book in the series, Tales of Earthsea, that she was twice mistaken as to what constituted the "ending" of her Earthsea tales. An invitation to write a short story set in Earthsea sent her back to that world, a challenge that re-engaged her and that resulted in a series of short stories. In these short stories, Le Guin began to explore aspects of her secondary world that, as she says in the foreword to the fifth book, puzzled her. Out of that exploration came an alternate vision of the female characters in the series, an alternate vision that culminates in the sixth book The Other Wind. In the last three books of the series, Le Guin's female characters evolve from relatively weak women, whose influence on their world is negligible and suspect, into powerful women who are the agents, subjects and representatives of radical change in Earthsea.