“A Woman May Be Good But Not Too Clever”
in the words of...
Hello Dearest reader,
Over the last month I’ve been in my happy place, the edit. That strange, focused joy of making order out of chaos, deciding what stays, what disappears, and what finally gets to be seen.
And in the quiet of that work, a familiar unease has returned. Not about structure or pacing, but about something more fundamental: which stories we’re actually allowed to tell, and which ones struggle to be recognised as stories at all
Over the years many of my writing tutors and screenwriting gurus insisted that “if you want to understand story, you have to start with Aristotle’s Poetics” It’s represented as the bedrock. The grammar of narrative itself.
So when I finally read Poetics closely, Aristotle’s line that “a woman may be good, but should not be too clever or manly” stopped me short.
I first encountered the real-world friction of this idea not in theory, but in Zoom rooms and development meetings, while writing a film with a woman at its centre.
The notes were:
She isn’t active enough in the first ten pages.
She reacts more than she initiates.
There isn’t enough drive.
This was Marie Skłodowska - Curie
A woman working inside extreme historical constraint, a foreigner, a mother, excluded from institutions, surviving through endurance rather than permission. The note wasn’t really about accuracy. It was about legibility. It values change that looks like action and victory. But a lot of real transformation happens quietly, under constraints, long before anyone is allowed to move.
That’s when I started to wonder whether the Hero’s Journey is really innate to human nature, or whether it’s something we’ve been taught to see as universal because it aligns with a very particular kind of life.
In Poetics, Aristotle isn’t only shaping philosophy.
He’s shaping our story judgment.
narrative theory
ideas of character
what counts as “action”
what looks like agency
If women were, by his definition, considered less rational, less decisive, and less suited to public action, then stories centred on them would always look deficient inside this framework, no matter how accurate or true those lives were.
This is often waved away as historical bias, something to overlook yet the framework remains intact.
So now, Centuries later, that same framework is universalised into the Hero’s Journey, a model that works exceptionally well for lives where leaving is possible, failure is survivable, and return is celebrated. Because it works so well there, it began to masquerade as a truth about all lives.
But what if the issue isn’t that some stories fail this arc?
What if they’re operating under a different logic altogether?
Many lives, especially women’s lives, are shaped by constraint, responsibility, and inheritance. They don’t arc neatly. They accumulate. Meaning builds through repetition, restraint, and attention.
When we insist on reading these lives through one story model, we misread stories, we misclassify agency. We label endurance as passivity. Staying as stagnation. Silence as absence.
Some stories aren’t “return with the elixir”
Painting by Frances Featherstone
They’re about reckoning.
About interruption.
About living truthfully inside limits that were never chosen.
Perhaps the problem was never women’s stories, but a story model that decided in advance who was allowed to look like a protagonist.
Until next time,
Annika xx