The 1990s
are a somewhat intriguing period in the career of Ursula Le Guin. Publishing only one at the outset (Tehanu in 1990), the decade would end
without another novel hitting the shelves.
She was far from idle, however.
Publishing almost fifty short stories and a handful of collections, Le
Guin remained hard at work through her seventh decade. (She is currently in her ninth and still
writing.) With Tehanu as the opening salvo, the vanguard of her efforts in this
time was to revise and consolidate her worldview regarding gender, family,
society, and sexuality, amongst other common themes. Putting all these ideas in one pot is her
collection Four Ways to Forgiveness
(1995).
Four Ways to Forgiveness contains “Betrayals,” “Forgiveness
Day,” “A Man of the People,” and “A Woman's Liberation”—all novellas published separately
between 1994 and 1995. Three told from
the perspective of women and one a man, all four involve the neighboring
planets of Yeowe and Werel, and are set in Le Guin’s ongoing Hainish series—marginally, as with all
the other related stories. Bound
together by a handful of strong threads, slavery, rural life, culture, social
revolution, race, gender, and the meaning of sexuality form the ideological
foundation upon which the four stories are built.
