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It deals with child sexual abuse, misogyny, and the threat of rape.

In some ways Tehanu is an angry book in some ways it is quite brutal. And it shows that these people have lives that are just as deep and wise and important as that of any king. Middle-aged women, abused and reviled children, housewives, widows, old men, village witches of the type that the Wise Masters of Roke look down upon.

This story focuses on the "unheroes"-not Archmages and Kings, not male patriarchs or High Priestesses, nor even callow youths on a mighty quest-but the smallfolk. What A Wizard of Earthsea took for granted: that men dominate the power structures of the world, that wisdom and education and learning and the Balance and the Equilibrium are in the keeping of men, that women are marginal figures in the world- still is true in Tehanu, but now problematized, deconstructed, questioned, developed. It's not a reset or a repudiation, but a re-examination.

Tehanu, then, is in large part Le Guin's attempt to revisit Earthsea from a feminist perspective, a woman's perspective. She later stated that she "blundered around for a while and then found feminist theory," and that the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women became "a Bible" for her ( see here.) In the early seventies she claimed to be writing "under the influence of her male animus" ( see here, also see my earlier gripings about sexism in A Wizard of Earthsea.) In later years she termed her earlier period as writing "as an honorary man." She had a major shift toward writing as a woman starting in the late seventies with The Eye of the Heron. In particular, she was famously something of a latecomer to feminism. Le Guin had changed and grown in the time since she began writing Earthsea. Tehanu was published in 1990, almost twenty years after the publication of The Farthest Shore. And Tehanu will indeed take place entirely on Ged's home island, Gont, and will feature all three of the characters from the first three books.

You could make an argument that the entirety of The Farthest Shore is just an explication of that third line.) It's like an announcement by Le Guin that she intends to bring the series full-circle, back to where it began. (And perhaps we understand it a little better, now. The fourth book of Earthsea, Tehanu, which is subtitled The Last Book of Earthsea, opens with the same fictional quotation as did the first book. Previously: The Farthest Shore Chapter Thirteen, "The Stone of Pain." Tehanu Please note that in keeping with the spirit of the reread, these posts sometimes contain spoilers past the current chapter, as well as for other books in the series. We are just starting the fourth book, Tehanu, with the first chapter "A Bad Thing." If you're wondering what this is all about, check out the introduction post, which also contains links to every post in the series so far. Hello everyone, and welcome once again to the Earthsea Reread.