Sometimes a book nips at your heels until you take notice. I first spotted Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in the magical establishment that is Raven Books in Blackrock a few months ago, picked it up, was intrigued by the title, read the back cover blurb and put it down again. A couple of weeks later I happened across it again in an Enniscorthy thrift shop, figured somebody up there was trying to tell me something, bought it and brought it home.

Estes’s book, first published in 1992, is an erudite and inspiring study of female psychology through the prism of folklore and fairy tale, a work that, in its re-examination of female archetypes and the innate wisdom of myth – of story itself – perfectly complements the work of Joseph Campbell, Marina Warner and Angela Carter.
I’m a sucker for self-improvement books, especially if they’re angled towards those of a creative bent (despite the new-agey jargon, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is another holy text). And while I’m no male feminist (most blokes who claim to be such are probably trying to get laid), it’s always enlightening for any father, brother or lover to see how the other half thinks, lives and breathes.
But Estes’s tome isn’t just for girls. Switch every ‘she’ to a ‘he’ and you can read it as a book about the human soul, about empowerment, instinct, sex, love, tribal memory, the head and the haunches, bad relationships, holy love affairs, ritual and art. It teases out the subtexts of well-worn tales like The Red Shoes and The Ugly Duckling and finds within them perennial resonances. Consider this reading of the Bluebeard myth:
“...This acquiescence to marrying the monster is actually decided when girls are very young, usually before five years of age. They are taught to not see, and instead ‘make pretty’ all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This early training is why the youngest sister can say, ‘Hmmm, his beard isn’t really that blue.’ This early training to ‘be nice’ causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to ‘be nice’ in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.”
My discovery of Estes’s book came, coincidentally enough, at the end of a humdinger year for female Irish artists: Margaret Healy, Miss Paula Flynn, Wallis Bird, Odi, Julie Feeney (2010 should see the release of Carol Keogh’s debut solo album, plus the long overdue unveiling of Alice Jago’s Born Stubborn). In the wider world, there were great records by Bat For Lashes, Neko Case, Emm Gryner and Florence & the Machine. If any song could soundtrack Women Who Run With the Wolves, it’s Florence’s ‘Rabbit Heart’, a rousing paean to the moment a woman comes into herself, realises what it is she was put on earth to do, and summons the courage to go about it: “This is a gift, it comes with a price”. Estes, one imagines, would approve.