Tehanu

Tehanu Review

Tehanu is the fourth Earthsea book, written eighteen years after The Farthest Shore, and it is Le Guin’s explicit feminist reckoning with the world she had built. The original three Earthsea books were not unreflective about gender — The Tombs of Atuan is among the finest feminist novels in fantasy, and Le Guin’s whole career was shaped by a consciousness of what conventions she was working against — but they were still books in which the central heroism was male, the central power was male, and the central perspective was male. Tehanu asks: what did that world look like from where the women were?

Tenar was last seen at the end of The Tombs of Atuan as a young woman newly freed from her role as priestess in the Tombs of Atuan. In Tehanu she is in her fifties, a widow with grown children, farming a small holding on Gont. When she takes in a child named Therru — burned and abused and marked for life — and when Ged, the great Archmage who sacrificed his power at the end of The Farthest Shore, arrives in her life as a broken man with nothing left of his magic, the novel becomes about what life looks like in the absence of the things that defined the heroic tradition.

Le Guin is doing something genuinely difficult here: she is writing convincingly from the perspective of an ordinary woman doing ordinary things — cooking, cleaning, caring for an injured man and a damaged child — while making the case that this is not a lesser story than the heroic one, but a different and equally real one. The novel’s deliberate domesticity is its argument.

Tehanu won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, which surprised some readers and confirmed what Le Guin’s admirers already knew: she was a writer whose development continued rather than coasting on reputation.