ROE, Sue (Lynn) 1953-

PERSONAL:

Female. Born November 27, 1953, in Ames, IA; daughter of Kenneth and Ann (Bennett) Roe; children: Mary Ann. Education: Iowa State University, B.A., 1977. Hobbies and other interests: Photography.

ADDRESSES:

Home—503 Dennis Dr., Marshalltown, IA 50158-4053. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, and critic. Nevada Evening Journal, Nevada, IA, writer, 1978-79; Time-Republican, Marshalltown, IA, editor, 1978-98; freelance writer, 1980—; Marshalltown Community College, instructor, 1985; Marshalltown School District Newsletter, editor, 1993-98; Iowa Valley Community College district marketing and communications services, supervisor, 1999—. University of East Anglia, lecturer in creative writing. Emergency Food Box, Marshalltown, member, board of directors and publicity chairman, 1984-94; Elim Children's Center, president, 1994-98; Marshalltown School District Communications Committee, member, 1993-98; United Way, Marshalltown, IA, publicity chair, 1985.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Associated Press, News writing spot news award, 1994; Iowa Newspaper Association, Best News Story, 1991; Governor of Iowa, volunteer award, 1991.

WRITINGS:

Estella, Her Expectations: A Novel, Harvester (Brighton, Sussex, England), 1982.

Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf's Writing Practice, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor) Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, introduction and notes by Sue Roe, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Women Reading Women's Writing, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

(With others) The Semi-transparent Envelope: Women and Fiction, M. Boyars (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor, with Susan Sellers) The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Gwen John: A Life, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2001, published as Gwen John: A Painter's Life, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist and novelist Sue Roe is the author of several works focusing on women's issues and gender in fiction. She has also written critical and biographical works on female creators, including writer Virginia Woolf and painter Gwen John.

Born in 1953 in Ames, Iowa, Roe was educated at Iowa State University, where she received a B.A. in journalism. She has worked as a newspaper editor and freelance writer as well as an instructor in creative writing and as a marketing and communications services director. As a journalist, she received awards from the Associated Press and the Iowa Newspaper Association.

Among Roe's earliest works is the novel Estella, Her Expectations. "This impressionistic first novel emanates from the self-conscious awareness of a young girl, Estella," a young art student and writer who goes to live for a time with retired ballet dancer in a large house in the city, wrote Roger Manwell in British Book News. An "extraordinary first work," noted D. J. Taylor in Spectator, Estella "could best be described as a reverie in which Estella images herself in various female roles; a French maman, a gypsy's doxy, a writer. These are her 'Expectations.'"

Throughout the book there are parallels with nineteenth-century British writer Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, including similarities with characters such as Mrs. Haversham and Pip. "Estella is a sort of 'Great Expectations Through the Looking Glass,' and on the other side of the glass it is very much a woman's world, though not a feminist's," wrote John Mellors in the Listener. "At its center are the problems of female identity," wrote Rosemary Jackson in the Times Literary Supplement, "the difficulty of coinciding with the ideal image in the mirror."

"The parallels with Great Expectations grow faint as the book progresses, chiefly because there is very little plot," Mellors observed. "However, Estella is fascinating for the way Sue Roe uses words as if they were paint, lighting up the pages with color and inviting the reader (or viewer) to finger the impasto." Jackson remarked that, "Parallel to her attempt to create images of the 'pre-image,' Sue Roe tries to find words for the pre-verbal, close to the sensations of sight. Visual art is upheld as the ideal to which the novel should approximate—'I'd want to write a still life,' says Estella—and in many ways, this novel is an Impressionistic painting become literature (hence the very minimal narrative."

Written in first-person throughout, Estella bears the characteristics of an experimental novel. "The book's faults are those of every experimental work since Joyce," Taylor commented. "It is solipsistic, static up until the final page; readers who prefer what Martin Amis called 'the staid satisfactions' of plot, pace, and humor will find none of them here." "It is all very skillfully done," Manwell nonetheless remarked, the present-tense narrative "making Estella's physical observations alive and immediate," even though the consistent use of the present tense "becomes somewhat mannered," Maxwell said. Estella "is both extraordinary and original," Taylor concluded.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Roe, "contains an impressive array of essays—by well-known Woolf scholars and editors from Canada, the United States, and the UK—that explore Woolf's intellectual, social and cultural milieu, and her oeuvre," wrote Kathryn Harvey in Dalhousie Review. Among the topics covered are the intellectual climate in which Woolf lived and wrote; the social and political aspects of Woolf's work; and Woolf's connections with modernism. Other essays specifically focus on Woolf's novels, including Jacob's Room, The Voyage Out, Night and Day, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando. Two essays "explore what until recently have been undervalued or neglected aspects of Woolf's writing—her essays, diaries, and letters," Harvey remarked. Roe herself contributed an essay on Woolf and post-impressionism, which Harvey called "slightly over-dramatic at times," but which "presents an insightful analysis of the convergence of Bloomsbury's discussion of ethics and art and their influence on Woolf's experimentation with the synaesthetic possibilities of language."

J. J. Patton, writing in Choice, called The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf "a first-rate collection of original essays." Although J. H. Snape, writing in English Literature in Transition 1880-1900, noted some flaws, including a number of biases, omissions from some of the essays, and "a decidedly cliquish flavor," the book still "offers some very fine work, some scattered insights into the pleasures of reading Virginia Woolf's writings, and testifies to the lively interest in various aspects of her life." Despite the absence of any essay on the subject of Woolf and lesbianism, Harvey concluded that "The editors and authors are to be congratulated for weaving a complex and impressive tapestry of influences and associations that were so clearly important in Woolf's life and to her writing."

Roe further addresses issues of women and literature in Women Reading Women's Writing. The book, edited by Roe, "embodies a 'discreet dissatisfaction with the whole notion of feminist theory,'" wrote Elizabeth Boyd Thompson in Modern Fiction Studies. Thompson quotes Roe as saying that "there is an important distinction to be made, always, between a literary text as expressive of social, historical, or political issues, and any other kind of documentation" of those or similar issues. "The individual essays in this volume vary widely in style, tone, and approach," Thomson remarked, "but all argue powerfully for the importance of Roe's distinction. None attempts to force preconceived notions of political purity on unwilling texts." The volume includes essays on writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen, and George Eliot. To Thompson, the strongest essay in the book is Isobel Armstrong's work on Christina Rossetti, in which Armstrong suggests that "feminist criticism should avoid 'naive expression and psychological theories' and 'a simplified conception of the text and consciousness' and instead 'put pressure on inflexible and petrifying assumptions' and 'test out the conventions of criticism itself.' The essays in Women Reading Women's Writing are a convincing demonstration of how good feminist criticism which does that can be," Thompson concluded.

In Gwen John: A Painter's Life Roe "pens a well-tempered, bracing biography of the painter too often trivialized as Augustus John's sister or Auguste Rodin's lover," wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. The book began as a study of John's paintings, which is "evident from the detailed analysis of individual pictures, only a few of which are illustrated, its scrupulous discussions of technique and attentiveness to the painters developing theories about composition," wrote Belinda Thomson in the Times Literary Supplement. After deciding instead to undertake a biography, Roe "was given full access by the artist's family to documents still in private keeping," Thomson said. "She has also made extensive use of the important cache of letters sold in 1984 to the National Library of Wales." Roe's biography "is the most fully documented and complete account of Gwen John's life to date," Thomson remarked.

Using additional sources from the Musée Rodin and the Tate Archives, "Roe balances biography with a critical analysis of John's work," wrote Rebecca Tolley-Stokes in Library Journal, analyzing John's own standing as an artist outside her perhaps more well-known roles as Augustus John's sister, Rodin's mistress and model, and Whistler's student. "Roe's blend of insight and eloquent narrative merges into a thoughtful, enduring masterpiece," Tolley-Stokes commented. "Roe's identification with and deep respect for her venturesome subject, as well as the narrative's novelistic energy, add zest and conviction to her meticulous yet fluent account of an intense and demanding life," observed Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist.

Although Thomson noted that "A number of factual errors mar the text," such as misidentified geographical locations where events took place. However, Thomson also stated that "Roe's biography gives us much valuable detail and food for thought." A critic writing in Contemporary Review called the book a "sensitive biography" and "the best life we have yet had of this all too easily forgotten artist." In her biography of John, "Roe is sure of her judgments, and her technique is deliberate," wrote Ruth Scurr in New Statesman. "This is an example of a perfect match between biographer and subject: very rare and a genuine triumph for the genre."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

ARTnews, April, 2002, Ann Landi, review of Gwen John: A Painter's Life, p. 99.

Booklist, November 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Gwen John, p. 538.

British Book News, October, 1982, Roger Manwell, review of Estella, Her Expectations, pp. 641-642; April, 1986, review of Women Reading Women's Writing, pp. 223.

Choice, November, 2000, J. J. Patton, review of The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, p. 531.

Contemporary Review, September, 2001, review of Gwen John, p. 191.

Dalhousie Review, summer, 2000, Kathryn Harvey, review of The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, pp. 286-288.

English Literature in Transition 1880-1900, summer, 2001, J. H. Stape, review of The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, pp. 394-396.

Journal of Modern Literature, fall-winter, 1988, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, review of Women Reading Women's Writing, pp. 234-235.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2001, review of Gwen John, p. 1407.

Library Journal, December, 2001, Rebecca Tolley-Stokes, review of Gwen John, p. 118.

Listener, July 8, 1982, John Mellors, review of Estella, p. 23.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 1988, Elizabeth Boyd Thompson, review of Women Reading Women's Writing, pp. 747-749; summer, 1993, Christine Froula, review of Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf's Writing Practice, pp. 397-399.

New Statesman, Ruth Scurr, review of Gwen John, p. 53.

New Yorker, January 21, 2002, review of Gwen John, p. 83.

New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001, Stanford Schwartz, review of Gwen John, p. 36.

Publishers Weekly, October 15, 2001, review of Gwen John, p. 59.

Spectator, August 28, 1982, D. J. Taylor, review of Estella, p. 23.

Times Literary Supplement, June 11, 1982, Rosemary Jackson, review of Estella, p. 643; March 11, 1988, Marilyn Butler, review of Women Reading Women's Writing, pp. 283-285; February 15, 2002, Belinda Thomson, review of Gwen John, pp. 18-19.

Victorian Studies, summer, 1989, Barbara Leah Harman, review of Women Reading Women's Writing, pp. 601-603.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 2002, review of Gwen John, pp. 56-57.

Women's Review of Books, March, 1994, review of Jacob's Room, p. 17.*