Iconic feminist author, Marilyn French 1929-2009

Marilyn French, who has died aged 79, was a feminist writer whose impact was comparable to that of Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan, said the Times. Her first novel, The Women’s Room - which told the story of a group of American women freeing themselves from the constraints of traditional femininity - sold 20m copies worldwide, despite, or because of, the fact that some saw it as a work of poisonous polemic.

Its critics were especially outraged by one of the novel’s characters opining: "All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes." French was labelled a man-hater - a charge she didn't particularly seem to mind. "I never defended myself against that," she once explained to an interviewer, "because I do believe that men are to blame for the condition of women."

Born Marilyn Edwards in New York in 1929, she grew up determined not to become like her mother - whose life, she felt, was defined by the career of her father, an engineer. Yet shortly after leaving university, she found herself heading down the same path.

She married a man named Robert French, and took menial jobs to help him through law school. In return, he discouraged her ambition to write. They divorced in 1967 and she returned to university, going on to publish her first book, a critical study of James Joyce, in 1976.

Its success was overshadowed, however, by the appearance of The Women’s Room the following year, said the New York Times. French's friend Gloria Steinem compared the novel's influence to that of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man on the civil rights movement. "It expressed the experience of a huge number of women, and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy."

Alas, French's later novels did not match these heights, said The Guardian. Her erudite works of non-fiction, which tended to be about the subjugation of women, were received respectfully, although they had a tendency to over-romanticise. ("We were bound to the goddess who was immanent in nature," French wrote in one nostalgic tome, "in the vegetation and the moon, mistress of the animals, who fed us freely.")

In the last years of her life, this titan of the women's movement had to endure the indignity of failing to find a US publisher for In The Name of Friendship, a sequel to her most famous novel. Her pride was salved, however, when it became a bestseller in Holland. ·