When Margaret Atwood was a little girl in 1949, she saw a movie called The
Red Shoes. It is the story of a beautiful young woman who becomes a famous
ballerina, but commits suicide when she cannot satisfy one man, who wants
her to devote her entire life to her art, and another who loves her, but
subjugates her to become his muse and inspiration. She struggles to choose
art, but the choice destroys her. Margaret Atwood remembers being
devastated by this movie, but unlike many young girls of her time, she
escaped its underlying message. Sustained by a strong sense of herself,
Margaret Atwood achieved a stratospheric literary career. How did a young
girl, in those pre-feminist days, create the instinctive capacity to
believe in herself? As pre-eminent biographer Rosemary Sullivan says: The
answer has to do with the mystery of self-confidence. Self-confidence is
just one fascinating side of our most famous literary export, examined by
Rosemary Sullivan in The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood/Starting Out. Not a
biography, but a portrait of a woman and her generation -- this is the
unfolding of an enigma. For despite her tremendous success that transcends
the literary community, catapulting her into the realm of a household
name, Margaret Atwood has remained very much a private person with a
public persona. Rosemary Sullivan reveals the discrepancy between Atwood's
cool, acerbic public image and the down-to-earth, straight-dealing and
generous woman who actually writes the books. Throughout, she weaves the
issues of female creativity, authority and autonomy set against the
backdrop of a generation of women coming of age during one of the most
radically shifting times in contemporaryhistory.