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On the phone with Ursula K. Le Guin ten years ago, we were talking about pronouns.
The prescriptions of house style have a way of crumbling under the pens of great writers.
The sentence in question had three pronouns with singular impersonal antecedents.
Just ten years later, the question seems quaint.
But house style didnt permit they.
You find the usage in Shakespeare, she told me, defending her use of the plural pronoun.
That seems a worthy precedent.
I told the managing editor we had to stet the theys.
There was a wall is the first line of her 1974 novelThe Dispossessed(sometimes subtitledAn Ambiguous Utopia).
It wasnt so long ago that this was the case.
The wall in the first line ofThe Dispossessedsurrounds a landing field for spacecraft on the planet of Anarres.
Riven by walls and jails, Urras seems to him a sort of jail writ large.
In other words, its a gateway drug for young people to radical big ideas.
Science fiction would never be the same.
It was a revolution in style as much as one of ideas.
Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door.
But it was dead, dead!
What did the fool think he was doing?
Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo?
(Note the mischief inherent in likening a thoughtful person reading to a belligerent moron.)
Amused contempt, she wrote, was the proper mutual state of affairs between profit and art.
She was a best seller who devoted much of her life to writing poetry.
She knew literature was an unruly thing, impossible to trap behind any kind of wall.
