Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room and regarded as one of the great feminist¹ writers, has died of heart failure aged² 79 in New York.

The Women's Room的作者，被认为是最伟大的女权主义作家之一，Marilyn French日前在纽约因心力衰竭逝世，享年79岁。

The native New Yorker died on Saturday in a Manhattan hospital, said Carol Jenkins, a friend and president of the city's Women's Media Center.

Her 1977 novel about a housewife's rebellion against male domination sold 20m copies and was widely translated.

French's final novel is due to be published this autumn.

She was also working on a memoir³（传记，实录）.

French is survived by her son, Robert French, and her daughter Jamie French.

'Not a man-hater'

In a 2004 poll of listeners to BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, The Women's Room was voted one of the five books that have most changed the way women see themselves.

Set in 1950s America, the novel follows the fortunes of Mira, a conventional（普通的，常见的） and submissive（服从的，顺东的） young woman who ends up in a traditional marriage.

When it ends in divorce, Mira seeks a new life at Harvard as a graduate student.

Plunged⁴ into a world far removed from her own experience, she nonetheless（尽管如此） encounters the same problems with male-female power politics as she did in her marriage.

French was dubbed⁵（复制） anti-male for having a character in the novel say: "All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape⁶ us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes."

Carol Jenkins rejected the allegation about the late author's work.

"Those words came from a character, and she was not a man-hater, and never said that in her personal life," she told The Associated Press.

"But she wanted men to accept their part in the domination of women."

The novel, Ms Jenkins added, "connected with millions of women who had no way before of claiming their anger and discontent".

Cancer survivor⁷

The theme of male subjugation⁸（征服，镇压） of women runs through French's novels, essays, literary criticism and her four-volume, non-fiction From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women.

Born in Brooklyn, she graduated from Long Island's Hofstra University with a master's degree, studying philosophy and English literature. She taught there in the 1960s.

After her divorce, she earned a doctorate⁹（博士学位） from Harvard and was an English professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

A smoker¹⁰, she survived a battle with oesophageal（食管的） cancer in 1992 which included a 10-day coma¹¹（昏迷） she described in Season in Hell: A Memoir.