The Shriver article talks a bit about how hypermale the image of the American "Great Novelist" is. I'm re-reading Tender is the Night at the moment, and it is striking (at the early stage of the book that I've reached) that the central character is a man who feels too undamaged to be truly great -- he says that he is intact and therefore incomplete. So what does he do? He falls in love with a woman who is mentally ill, he kind of apprehends fracture through her own damage, to break out of his sterile intactness.
The "great American novelist" is stereotypically a man who is damaged, often by alcoholism, and there seems something interesting about the way that a female character's damage becomes in this book not the source of her own creativity, but a resource for a man's creativity. I can't remember the book well enough to know whether this demotion of a woman's personality is addressed for what it is. I think it must be, I think that must be the trend of the book. I bloody hope so.