Preface<br > I have arranged this selection o<br >essays in three parts: essays and lectures o11 politics， literature<br >and psychoanalysis. To maintain the theme I have<br >occasionally broken the chronological order by a few months<br >And although I have situated each piece briefy in time ant<br >place， I have not atteinpted any self-criticism for that woulc<br >be another book.<br > I took my degree in English Literature and for ten years<br >taught literature to university students. During this period -<br >the 1960s - I was actively involved in politics， first in Marxist<br >politics around the New Left Review and then in the feminism<br >of the Women s Liberation Movement. I wrote both literary<br >and political articles. At the time I thought of my work as<br >going along separate but parallel lines. When I came to make<br >this selection， I could see retrospectively their points of<br >connection in inyself.<br > Not very consciously， as a child and as an adult， I had<br >always been held by a feeling that for the last three hundred<br >years - in English cultu re at least- our determining sensibility<br >had been about growing up， our relationship to ourselves in<br >time. ttow do we become ourselves -- men or women? This<br >preoccupation took in the question of femininity， of sexual<br >difference.<br > My first political interests were influenced by the Sartre<br >who claimed that since Freud， novel-writing was almost<br >