By Elle Therese Napolitano

In Elizabeth Fisher’s 1970 story, “A Wall Around Her,” published in Aphra (Volume 4, Number 4), the main character pounds on the locked door of a house where she’s rented a room. As she waits for someone to respond, she is overcome by crushing loneliness and futility. “I never was in, never was and never will be, always outside, always trying to get in, beating with my fists, pleading, ‘Let me in. Let me in.’ Why don’t I just give up the struggle, stop trying to reach people, to be a human being.” 

Elizabeth Fisher was a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher and feminist, but these days, she is best known—and unknown, it turns out—for sparking Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” republished after Le Guin’s death as a tiny book (Ignota, 2019). It’s safe to say that now, thousands of people have seen her name in print—Le Guin names her right there in her resurging essay, along with a partial title of Fisher’s book, Woman’s Creation (though the publication date is wrong)—in which she puts forth “The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution.” Since Le Guin’s essay was reprinted, new writings about her essay have proliferated. Nearly all mention Fisher. But people don’t seem to know anything about her. There’s all this stuff out there about carrier bags and Ursula Le Guin, but what about Elizabeth Fisher? What about her life?  

A bit of context. I came to Elizabeth Fisher through Ursula Le Guin, as a late bloomer in an MFA program during the pandemic, struggling to make use of archetypal narrative structures—The Hero’s Journey, Freytag’s Triangle, Aristotle’s Poetics—to write the novel I was working on. They went only so far. To me, they didn’t adequately expose the raggedness of real life, especially for the characters I was writing about—two women searching for self-forgiveness by looking back on a twenty-year-old loss. Le Guin’s essay was a breath of fresh air. I was intrigued by the idea that a carrier bag could shape a story by what a writer puts inside of it: people, things and events, “ . . . things in a particular relationship to each other,” is how Le Guin describes it. Here is the image of the humble carrier bag, so different from the linear trajectories protagonists are meant to take. I couldn’t help but picture the tattered New Yorker bag I haul my writing pages around in, pages filled with baffled characters, both battered and sustained by the ebb and flow of life. 

And I kept thinking about Elizabeth Fisher. What turn of words did she use to ignite Le Guin’s mind so? I wanted to hear from the source. In idle moments I googled her, going down many rabbit holes. Because I read she was an anthropologist, I added the word to my searches. This move netted several Elizabeth Fishers, some of them anthropologists, Helen Elizabeth Fisher, for example, the biological anthropologist famous for researching the science of love and for advising Match.com. But none were my Elizabeth Fisher.  

Fisher’s book is out of print, but I found a used copy online—full title: Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (McGraw-Hill, 1980). In the introduction, I found her intelligent, wry voice: “After one visionary night, I said to myself, ‘I’ve just rewritten Engel’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ which was patently untrue since at that moment I had written nothing, though later on it would be true and untrue.” In Woman’s Creation, Fisher remarkably and logically debunks the familiar narrative that places man as heroic hunter at the center of human evolution. “The male bias in anthropology led to systematic undervaluation of the role of women,” she asserts. She synthesizes evidence from anthropology, biology, and ethology to show that humankind’s first invention was female-designed, most certainly humble carrying devices—receptacles, crafted or found—to hold and transport things to eat, and to carry babies hands-free, all the better to gather food and bring it home. These cultural carrying technologies exponentially increased human survival. Fisher called it the Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, “an attempt to look with a female perspective at what till now had been seen largely through the male eye.” The back cover tells me she founded Aphra, the first feminist literary magazine in the United States. There’s no mention of her being an anthropologist. 

Le Guin never wrote that Fisher was an anthropologist. That erroneous designation appears in those subsequent essays that mushroomed across the internet after Le Guin’s death. The beginnings of these texts almost all refer to “the anthropologist, Elizabeth Fisher.” It seems that after the first time it was written, the mistake, which lives on in the internet today, was picked up and repeated, reiterations of the original error. The misidentification is understandable: Woman’s Creation is meticulously researched and is classified as Women’s Studies/Anthropology. Still, it made Fisher more difficult to find, more invisible.  

But connecting Fisher to Aphra was the breakthrough I needed. “The emphasis will be on art, not ideology, we shall publish what we like and what we respond to, with the idea that we shall be speaking directly to women so they can say ‘There am I’ and feel stronger and more doing.” There between Aphra’s covers women did see themselves and find a home for their work—Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Alix Kates Shulman, Kate Millet, Jane Augustine, Myrna Lamb, Erica Jong, Tillie Olsen, Joan Silber—to name a few. It’s an illustrious gathering of writers and artists with Elizabeth Fisher at the center, holding the door open, beckoning them inside. It struck me then, that there is something incredibly moving here, that Fisher, who provided a platform for writers we love today, whose ideas inspired Ursula Le Guin and now countless new writers who only read Le Guin’s work, has disappeared from the conversation. There is irony as well, as both Fisher’s book and Le Guin’s essay advocate for the narratives of those who are absent, silenced, and relegated to the background.  

I included “Aphra” in my next online query and stumbled upon a New York Times obituary about her death in 1982 in Sag Harbor. Here I read Fisher had gone to Smith College and had worked in Rome for an American newspaper, and that Woman’s Creation was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1979. From certain wording: ”The cause of death is being investigated by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office,” I surmised her end was untimely. Was it foul play? Following that hunch, I googled “Elizabeth Fisher homicide, New York.” This led me to a different Times article, headlined: “Killed By Her Brother; Elizabeth Fisher Victim Of A Carelessly Handled Rifle.” The rifle was discharged, “Just as his sister, on a chair, was reaching for her writing desk key, and the bullet entered her neck.” My heart jumped. Surely, a writer, reaching for her writing desk key was the Elizabeth Fisher I sought! But no, this Elizabeth Fisher was thirteen years old when she died on August 24, 1896—I hadn’t noticed the date at first—so not my Elizabeth at all. 

Then, up came a link to a German Wikipedia page for “Elizabeth Fisher, Journalist.” Here finally, was my Elizabeth Fisher. The page included a photograph from MacDowell’s website where she was an artist in residence in 1974, 1975, and 1980. In it we see her staring out at the camera, behind groovy, oversized eyeglasses. I recognized the wild look in her eyes as that of a writer pulled from the depths of her thoughts, momentarily obliging the needs of the physical world but still tethered to that other place. In one hand she holds a stack of papers. Her other hand hovers over a manual typewriter on a desk perpendicular to the window. In the background is a line of file folders, a cup of pens and pencils, and a roll of clear tape. Her hair is held back in a headband. Wikipedia says she committed suicide on January 1, 1982.  

Elizabeth Fisher is the name Betty Friedman chose for herself as an adult, Fisher being her mother’s family name. She was born “Female Friedman,” in New York on September 5, 1924, the year spiral notebooks were invented, four years after women won the hard-fought right to vote. Her parents, Evelyn and Max Friedman didn’t name her Betty until after the birth certificate was issued. The placeholder, “Female,” seems quirkily presaged for the newborn who would become the woman to reinterpret human evolution through a feminist lens. Her Jewish name was meant to be Bathsheba, a name Fisher always liked, meaning “Daughter of the Oath.” 

I learned about Fisher’s name from her daughter, Ellen Harold. I first found Harold in her mother’s Times obituary, although her last name is misspelled. Then, after I located every issue of Aphra, I noticed her name in several volumes as the author of essays and as a guest editor. From there, I found her on Instagram. I could have messaged her but felt shy about it; I wanted to ask about her mother’s life and death, and it seemed insensitive to do so over social media. Instead, I sent a snail mail letter. A few weeks later she replied on my own Instagram account: “I’ll be in touch.”  

Alix Kates Shulman is another name I found in Aphra’s pages. Shulman, a writer with a career spanning sixty years and counting, is all over the internet. Watch the 2014 documentary, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, and you’ll see her. She is a leading feminist seeking equal rights for women across all domains of life. Her 1969 essay, “A Marriage Agreement,” provoked lively conversations in homes across the country, including my own parents’ outside Chicago, where my mother, with five young daughters at the time (she would have two more), was fed up with the inequalities within her marriage and our father’s overblown kingliness. Shulman’s bestselling novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, first published in 1972 was reissued in 2019. I spoke with her by phone in December of 2023 and again at her New York apartment in March of 2024.  

To be with Alix Kates Shulman is to be in the presence of someone both fully actualized and burgeoning with potential. “I’m leaving my brain to science,” she told me. A canvas bag declaring, “I had an abortion,” rested on a counter in the entryway of her apartment, next to her keys and purse. She brewed tea for us, brought back from her recent trip to Tanzania.  

Decades before Taylor Swift sang about living on Cornelia Street, Elizabeth Fisher had a room of her own in a 1920’s walk-up directly across from what would become Swift’s resplendent place. Fisher’s studio apartment, #20 at 22 Cornelia Street, was also across from the Cornelia Street Café where artists would gather for music and literary readings. “Very Village,” Shulman said. I had traipsed all over Greenwich Village that morning, gawking at Fisher’s old building, imagining her stopping at cafes to write as I am wont to do. “Of course, she did,” said Shulman who remembers Fisher carrying a flask of booze to spike her drinks. She recalls Fisher’s Cornelia Street studio being furnished with found things. “It was your typical walk-up, very bohemian. I don’t recall seeing a vacuum or a broom.” Fisher would let friends crash there and offered it as a private haven for them to rendezvous with lovers. I looked it up online and found a now gentrified studio, about 314 square feet, featuring a decorative fireplace, high-beamed ceilings, bookshelves, and brick walls. It sold for almost half a million in 2022. 

Fisher is smiling easily, seemingly mid-laugh in the photo Shulman paired with the eulogy she wrote for her friend. The photo, taken by Jill Krementz, famous for photographing writers, shows Fisher as if she’d been in motion and hadn’t quite stopped when the camera caught her. Her eyes sparkle. What made her light up like that? For one thing, anything absurd about human nature, Shulman said, “especially her own wry annotations about people”—men making the scene at Max’s Kansas City—a nightclub in Manhattan back then—sidling up to order a drink, trying out pick-up lines and smooth moves. “She was very pleased with her transgressions.” Did Elizabeth have hobbies? Shulman gave me an indulgent smile. “We didn’t have hobbies separate from the movement which was our passion and purpose.” 

Shulman said Woman’s Creation had been largely ignored by the literary establishment, which was almost all male. “It was hell for a woman to have a book reviewed, and our books were often trashed. As a result, they were not widely read and are mostly forgotten.” She strode over to her expansive book shelves—women authors on one side, men on the other. She began pulling out books written by women. Some I knew: Zora Neale Hurston, Carol Shields, Grace Paley, Alice Munroe. Others I embarrassingly didn’t know: Christina Stead, Barbara Smith, Margo Jefferson, Hannah Green, Sylvia Townsend Warner. To bring her point home, Shulman next pulled books from the men’s side of her shelves, hollering out their names. It was true, I knew more of them. “See?” she said. 

There was a period between 1973 and 1990 when Le Guin was learning to write as a woman. “What I’d been doing as a writer was being a woman pretending to think like a man . . . ” she says in the documentary about her directed by Arwen Curry. It was 1986 when Le Guin wrote “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” This means she would have come upon Elizabeth Fisher’s Woman’s Creation sometime between 1979 and then. I checked with the University of Oregon Libraries in Eugene where Le Guin’s papers are kept, hoping to find Fisher’s book in one of the boxes—with marginalia, my dream!—perhaps even issues of Aphra. The archivist, Maggie Dobson kindly wrote back to say no, Le Guin’s papers do not include Fisher’s book nor any issues of Aphra, however, the library has a first edition copy of Woman’s Creation. I wondered if its library card would show Le Guin had checked it out before 1986. Dobson politely wrote back to say she doesn’t have Le Guin’s circulation history. 

Anyway, I picture Le Guin reading Woman’s Creation, captivated by its clarity. I see her filling a yellow pad with Fisher’s words: carrier bag, cultural inventions, male bias, babies, women, home, basketry, pottery, receptacles. “A large leaf for folding, a piece of bark, a broken ostrich egg.” Here the singular hero is somewhere else. It’s a light bulb moment for Le Guin, I imagine, as she realizes the same gender biases that skew human history also skew storytelling.  

Speaking with David Naimon on his podcast Between the Covers, the writer Lidia Yuknavitch describes Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction as “. . . a playful deconstruction of the hero’s journey or a certain plot line that would valorize the male hero.” Yuknavitch says it’s not that the hero’s journey is bad, but its prevalence has allowed storytelling to be “colonized by the action hero, as if that’s the only story that matters and all other stories exist to support that story.” Lest she perpetuate models of received authority, Le Guin does not dictate specific craft elements of a carrier bag narrative. Instead, she challenges herself and us to explore the “nature, subject and words” of stories that eschew received form. Aha, I thought, these are the books I love— Joyce Carol Oates’ Black Water, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Mariam Toews’ Women Talking, Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, for example, books with “alternative structures” as they’re often called—in spite of the many novels with these shapes. What I understood after absorbing Le Guin’s essay and other books, including Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult, 2019) is that my frustration with my own novel was a question of incompatibility between content and container. 

“Reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind,” Le Guin once wrote. Contemplating her work next to Fisher’s, I feel myself eavesdropping on a conversation between them. “The view from the bottom may not be wide, but it is deep and upward, and for centuries women have had unique opportunities for practicing observation,” Fisher writes in Aphra in 1972. As if turning the idea over with her, Ursula writes in the 2012 edition of Tehanu, “By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included . . . Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people.”  

Unlike Le Guin whose papers are expertly archived, Fisher’s are nowhere and everywhere. Smith College never pursued them—Fisher had dropped out. Woman’s Creation and Aphra are out of print but can be found for sale on the internet.  

I met Fisher’s daughter, Ellen Harold, for lunch at a noodle restaurant in Brooklyn. She has two adult children and is a grandmother. Her Instagram is filled with photos of flowers and her amusing granddog, who enjoys posing on a pedestal in the park. One post I lingered over mentions a memory she has of her mother, broiling boned shad with lime. The day we met, she sent a text message describing herself so I would recognize her. “I am wearing a brown jacket and a black hat with fake fur, a green scarf and teal sneakers. And a purple canvas purse and I’m carrying a tote bag with gold and purple. I hope you are not colorblind!” I chuckled at her mention of carrying a tote bag.  

“My mom was an avid reader and that gave her a leg up,” Ellen Harold told me when I marveled at the interdisciplinary scholarship of Woman’s Creation. “She read everything— Proust, the Bible. She had all this knowledge and saw the connections.” In Woman’s Creation, Fisher writes about being influenced by two feminist classics that taught her to “question received authority,” Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Ruth Herschberger’s Adam’s Rib. This was at a time when she earned a living by editing the Encyclopedia Britannica and writing new dictionary entries based on input from “experts” and information already in print and handed down. “Lessons in skepticism were not wanting.” 

At age seven, quarantined at home with scarlet fever, Fisher read “all of Dickens,” as she put it. She skipped ahead two grades in elementary school. In her senior year at Julia Richmond High School in New York, she was editor of the yearbook. Summers, she attended the Ethical Culture Camp in Cooperstown, and it was there as an idealistic fourteen-year-old that she first encountered notions of social justice. She joined other campers in raising funds for the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Her attempts to discuss these topics with her father (an American basketball hall of famer) didn’t go well; he accused her of being a communist. “My mom didn’t have a background of being supported,” Harold said. After high school, Fisher attended Smith—a disaster for one so young amidst an older, more sophisticated crowd, at least as intelligent as she was. She’d confided her difficulties to a professor who laughed at her. She was fifteen when she dropped out and made her first suicide attempt, an overdose of aspirin taken in a hotel room that landed her in the hospital.  

Four years after leaving Smith, Fisher met and married Michael Harold—she was nineteen and he was twenty-nine. Ellen Harold is their only child. For a while they lived in the Bronx and then, before Harold was two, they moved to an apartment in the East Village. The rooms were sunny but the marriage was tumultuous. Before her third birthday, Harold witnessed her parents’ final fight. “My father hit her and she called the police.” To their credit, both parents separately corroborated her recollection when Harold asked about it twenty-five years later. She smiled then, remembering her mother taking her for a “mega-lump,” their code word for ice cream. She remembers her mom dressing her in pants and giving her trains to play with. She remembers reading books companionably next to her mother. Fisher might not have had hobbies, but she was the best cook Harold has ever known. She also played the piano and gardened. “There you are!” she would exclaim to the plants she raised and loved. She disliked “ornament, jewelry and fripperies.” Though Shulman remembered a flask filled with booze, Harold said it was actually a thermos holding ice cubes to go with the bourbon her mother would order when out—but only after five ᴘ.ᴍ. And the reason Shulman might not have seen a vacuum or broom in Fisher’s Cornelia Street studio is that Fisher employed a cleaning lady, a German woman who had worked for the family. 

When Harold was five, Fisher left her in the care of her grandparents while she traveled to Yugoslavia, curious to see if there was a Communist alternative to Stalin’s Russia. She rode on the Orient Express and ended up in Rome where she was hired as a columnist for Rome Daily American, writing as Betty Harold. In February of 1952, she sent for Harold, who was brought over on the ship USS Constitution by her grandparents. Fisher met them in Naples, driving a tiny Fiat. For two years, Harold lived with her mother in Rome.  

Fisher’s second marriage was to Angelo Savelli, an Italian painter and sculptor of some acclaim. In the States, they had an eighteenth-century stone house on twenty acres of land in Pennsylvania, where Fisher planted one thousand white pine trees. They were married for twenty-nine years, until she ended her life. My sense, from reading between the lines in a short piece she wrote for Aphra’s “Marriage Issue” (Volume 4 Number 4, 1973), is that she hoped to forge a creative life with Savelli as an equal partner. Her desire for a marriage of equals was not so different from what Le Guin achieved with her beloved husband Charles, who supported her work and protected her writing time. Two years after Fisher’s death, Savelli sculpted a fifty-four-foot piece devoted to her, “Glory of a Broken Wing.” I doubt Fisher would have cared for the patronizing title. 

Aphra honors Aphra Behn (1640-1689) the first woman writing in English, known to earn money from her work. This detail is not trivial. Fisher wanted women to have equal access to the male dominated literary world and she deeply desired to earn her living through her writing. “Tired of Bellowing and Rothing, Mailering and Malamuding, we looked around at the current literary scene and decided that, for whatever reasons of history and economics, it is still, or perhaps more than ever, dominated by the Judeo-Christian patriarchal ethos,” she writes in the first Aphra. “Aphra was Elizabeth’s big fuck you to the patriarchal literary establishment,” Shulman said. During the Aphra years, Fisher would have periods of extreme activity and then would fall into depression. “When she was manic, she was very effective and completely together,” Shulman said. “She would put on wonderful programs—round-the-clock readings on the radio of everything Virginia Woolf ever wrote.”  

Fisher’s vision for Aphra was avant-garde. At the time, the women’s movement was interested in manifestos—not stories, poems, and other art forms. An oversight, in my opinion, as the arts are more affecting for many people than rhetoric could ever be. Shulman agrees. “Consciousness raising was the major organizing tool of the movement,” she said, “women talking, women telling it like it is.” I recall my own mother, emboldened by the women’s movement, going on “strike” from endless housework. I was ten years old the first time. “Be quiet, Mom’s on strike,” my sisters and I whispered as we tiptoed past the chair where she sat defiantly reading a book in the middle of the day. “Oh, that’s marvelous,” Shulman said, when I recalled my mother’s fury to her. I didn’t know it at the time, but mom’s first strike coincided with the Women’s Strike for Equality that took place on August 26, 1970.  

I’d been imagining Elizabeth Fisher for well over a year before I heard her voice—her actual voice, speaking out from a crisp, clear recording of “Aphra Speaks,” a radio series on WBAI in New York produced by Ann Snitow. I located only one recording from December 8, 1972. In it, Elizabeth Fisher, Gerry Sachs, Margaret Lamb, and Ellen Harold discuss two 19^th-century novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot and Oblomov by Goncharov. The recording is of high quality: at one point, I hear the snap and hiss of a cigarette being lit, followed by the metal lid of a thermos or flask being unscrewed, liquid being poured, and the lid being replaced. When the conversation briefly veers to Tolstoy, Fisher interrupts to say he was very anti-feminist. “I went back to War and Peace, and I found Tolstoy quite irritating on the subject of women. And great he may be, but once your consciousness is raised, you find you don’t accept things as well as you used to.”  

In her eulogy for Fisher, Shulman wrote that she “was incapable of dissembling.” I hear traces of Fisher’s bluntness throughout the “Aphra Speaks” recording. In another exchange, Fisher observes that George Eliot wrote “in her time,” meaning she wrote guardedly about women’s reality in the nineteenth century, and in doing so capitulates to the patriarchy’s norms. She allows that Eliot had no other choice if she wanted Middlemarch to sell. “Otherwise, you’re ahead of your time and your work is discovered in a later century.” Fisher is speaking of George Eliot but could have been referring to herself and Woman’s Creation, which she was already working on. “As an artist, she [Eliot] had to realize that if you criticize too much, you can’t work . . . it’s too shaking,” she says. When Gerry Sachs and Margaret Lamb push her on this Fisher tetchily tells them, “I think you both misunderstood what I meant, because I didn’t mean it as a criticism of George Eliot, and I didn’t mean it as a fact of George Eliot’s having willfully set out to write a bestseller. I meant that she was in her time.” Her point, she insists, isn’t about Eliot per se but about the suppression of all women in the nineteenth century. To my ears, Fisher’s words are a lament over a reality she refused to accept. I also hear her frustration over not being understood. But she seems to hold no grudges—the women go on to playfully discuss their feminist appreciation for Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw, who might have been a good lover. The tape ends with the women giggling over Fisher’s closing statement, “Let’s hope everyone that listens will buy these books and not read some of our contemporary misogynist male novels.” “Right on,” someone else says. 

MacDowell’s 1979-80 Winter Newsletter reports that Fisher worked on a novel during her final residency, not the two books meant to follow Woman’s Creation. She was already feeling the widening gap between her serious and accomplished work and their exclusion from the cultural conversation. Woman’s Creation was well reviewed in the New York Times in August of 1979 by Alice S. Rossi, a sociologist and feminist scholar. Rossi titled her review, “Without the Male Prism,” a line lightly revised from page 401 of Fisher’s book. A Kirkus Review was more critical. That writer, who must not have ever shopped with an infant or toddler in tow, seems to find it preposterous that women invented receptacles for gathering food and holding babies.  

Between 1980 and 1982, while Fisher was working on sequels to Woman’s Creation, and possibly the novel mentioned in MacDowell’s records, she would sometimes call Shulman. The writing wasn’t going well and she was falling deeper into despair. “Elizabeth was sort of a loner,” said Shulman. “She had friends but no one who could help pick up the pieces when she couldn’t get things done.” Fisher wrote in order to change the way the world failed women—while living and writing within its dysfunctional systems. “She had these very big ideas which required a lot of research for which she had no credentialed authority. It was a time when men were allowed to write big ideas but if you were a woman, you would not be encouraged.” Fisher had rented a studio on the top floor of a mansion in Sag Harbor and another place overlooking the water, for her parents who were in poor health. “She was overwhelmed,” said Shulman. “We all felt that was true. She talked convincingly about her hopelessness and she didn’t think she could cope with caring for her parents.”  

The strife in Fisher’s life at that time went deeper than her close friends imagined. Her sister had accused her of kidnapping their parents and was suing her for it. Fisher was also exchanging lawsuits with a contractor for problems with an underground home she was building. To top it off, she suffered from severe back pain for which swimming was her only relief, and there were money problems exacerbated by the greatest economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression. “It all sounds incredible when I recount it,” texted Harold, in our ongoing conversation.  

It was in her Sag Harbor studio on New Year’s Day, 1982, that Fisher ended her life. The cause was an overdose of tranquilizers she’d been hoarding, washed down with alcohol. She left a suicide letter. It opened with an explanation of why she felt she had to take her parents under her care. The police began reading the letter to Harold, but she stopped them. She didn’t want to hear the rest. “From my point of view it was a slow train wreck or had been until it became an actual train wreck.” She had a three-year-old and was expecting another child at the time, while she had to clean out her mother’s apartment and deal with her uncooperative stepfather, who refused to answer the phone. Tragically, Ellen’s baby died during a difficult delivery—an “obstetrical catastrophe.”  

Considering the woman’s movement, Fisher writes, “In the idealism of those first years, we had had a vision that the whole sickness of civilization could be seen in miniature in the power nexus between the sexes and that in attacking the latter we could also come out with a kinder, more just, and loving world.” It’s this, Fisher’s desire to mend the world and her inability to do so in her lifetime that I find so moving. She was utterly baffled that even after she laid the facts bare about women’s crucial role in the advancement of humankind, the world didn’t rush to correct its misogynistic social structures. My mathematically minded husband said it’s as if she brought us one plus one equals two, not three, so why aren’t we setting things right? What are we waiting for?  

I wish Fisher could have known how Le Guin brilliantly applied her findings in Woman’s Creation to the craft of writing that now encourages writers like me. With Le Guin as collaborator and conduit, Fisher’s research now reaches deeply inside at least one historically male-privileged and biased institution—the literary world—and does so at the fundamental level of form and structure. This is a radical act.  

Despite Fisher’s candor in life, she remains enigmatic. I scour Woman’s Creation and issues of Aphra for scraps of her interiority. I keep returning to the Aphra Speaks radio program and her words, “It’s too shaking.” I’m struck by her word choice, the visceral fear of change she recognized in privileged societal hierarchies. “What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective,” Le Guin wrote in her essay. Her words mirror Fisher’s story, “A Wall Around Her,” and her main character locked out of a house wondering if she should give up trying to be human. Sure, it’s a fictional event, but at a deeper level, it poses the fundamental question of the women’s movement: Aren’t women human? Because when human rights are denied to a group of people—any group of people—it’s the same thing as saying they are not human.  

I’ve come to care about Elizabeth Fisher, to love her the way I love my deeply flawed fictional characters—the ordinary wimps and klutzes I’m interested in writing about. I would have enjoyed yucking it up with her at Max’s Kansas City, people-watching with her from a café table on Cornelia Street, and being in a book club with her, where her insights would both awe and probably intimidate me. 

“We are all frail and anxious creatures at the mercy of forces over which we have little or no control, and death is the supreme demonstration of this fact,” Fisher writes in Woman’s Creation. And yet she took her own life. I wish I could place candles in tall glass jars outside her Cornelia Street studio, and arrange ribboned bundles of flowers and painted rocks beside them and photos of her at her typewriter. “Nothing ever ends: the end is the beginning,” reads Fisher’s final line in Woman’s Creation. “True journey is return,” Le Guin replies. 

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Elle Therese Napolitano’s debut novel, THIS IS ALSO LIFE, was awarded the 2025 Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize and will be published in 2027 by WTAW Press. She earned her MFA from The Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a PhD in Organizational Learning from the University of New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Hoxie Gorge Review, Into the Void, and The Woven Tale Press. One story was shortlisted for the Glimmer Train 2017 Short Story Award, and another was a finalist for the 2017 Reynolds Price Award for Fiction. Elle grew up in Chicagoland, one of seven sisters, and now lives with her husband and dogs in Oakland, CA, where she’s working on a new novel. ellenapolitano.com