She Was Written by a Man ✦ A Home PhD

For the girl who will defend Daisy Buchanan and Cathy Ames to anyone.

Medea. Lady Macbeth. Emma Bovary. Daisy Buchanan. Literature's most "difficult" women have one thing in common: a man held the pen. This course asks the question English class skipped: is she a flawed woman, or a shadow cast by the man who wrote her? Twelve weeks, from Eve and the Greek tragedies to East of Eden.

Inside the PhD:

• 12 weeks, nearly 3,000 years: Eve and Pandora → Medea and Clytemnestra → Lady Macbeth → Emma Bovary → Anna Karenina and Tess → Carmen and Salome → Hedda Gabler → Daisy Buchanan and Brett Ashley → Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly → Cathy Ames

• The primary texts: Genesis, Euripides, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Fitzgerald, Capote and Steinbeck, plus Zelda Fitzgerald telling her side, every one linked free to read or borrow

• The real criticism: The Madwoman in the Attic, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Beard, the essay that named the male gaze, Natalie Haynes's Pandora's Jar, so you get the actual arguments, not the hot-take version

• A film, lecture or song every week: Maria Callas as Medea, Frances McDormand's Lady Macbeth, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, both Gatsbys, Lana's "Young and Beautiful"

• Seminar questions every week to make you actually think. One from Week 9: "Nick narrates, and Nick decides Tom and Daisy were careless people. What does he gain by making Daisy careless?"

• A weekly essay and a creative response: Eve's monologue before she eats, Clytemnestra's closing argument to a jury, Emma's last letter, Daisy's diary the night after the accident

• The Case File: one page per woman (the charge against her, what she actually wanted, how she ended, who narrates her)

• The Wider Roster: 19 more women written by men (Ophelia, Miss Havisham, Blanche DuBois, Molly Bloom...) to go deeper

• A capstone thesis and creative project, so you finish like an actual candidate (Emma Bovary and Holly Golightly at breakfast is one of the options)

• A course playlist to write to: Kate Bush, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Florence, Lana, Mitski

This is for you if you want to:

• Finally explain why you love the women everyone calls toxic

• Read the classics you keep meaning to, with the questions handed to you

• Be a student again, minus the tuition

• Write songs, scenes or videos in the voice of women who never got to narrate themselves

The price, plainly:

Under $1 a week. Less than a new paperback of East of Eden. Every book links to a free text or a free library loan, articles go through a free JSTOR account, and every film links to where it streams, so there's nothing else to buy. What you're paying for is the thread that ties it all together, so you don't spend months building it yourself.

What it asks of you: a notebook, a library card and six to eight hours a week.

How you'll get it:

• A 14-page PDF syllabus in your inbox the second you check out

• Every link clickable, straight to the free text, lecture or film

• Week one starts whenever you do. Tonight works.