SOURCE: An excerpt, in The Wild Garden or Speaking of Writing, University of California Press, 1963, pp. 23-55.

In this excerpt from his book-length commentary regarding his development as a writer, Wilson discusses the manner in which events and characters from his life influenced his short fiction.

Wilson on His Female Protagonists:

I like writing about women, and I like having women as my central figures. This is a very curious thing, I don't know how to explain it. It is to do with my feeling, for all that it might look today as though it were not so—maybe it comes from my mother and so on, but I feel that women have had a very bad deal in life, and I feel on the side of my woman characters very strongly indeed. It always interests me that people say, 'Oh, your awful portraits of women,' as...