Shashi Deshpande presents a sensitive portrayal of Indian Womanhood treading the labyrinthine paths of human mind with a rare gift for sharp psychological insights into the subtleties of the human female, supported with rich evocative, unassuming and pretentious style. She delicately delineates the swings of mood, the seesaw moments of joy and despair, the fragments of feelings perceived and suppressed, heart-wringing anguish of the narrator protagonist Jaya, a housewife and a failed writer. Her unequivocal feminist stand has got her a distinctive place in the contemporary Indian English fiction. Her themes are based on lives and problems of women only. Her novels are in themselves the schools of psyche of those people whose capacity for rational thought vanishes on being victimized to traumatic experience ‘That Long Silence’, (1988) is a novel of woman and her life Shashi Deshpande confesses that “only a woman could read my books - they are written from the inside, as it were.” (.1) Her novels are autobiographical in nature depicting her own experiences of the educated middle class Indian women’s predicament and they tend to be gender specific. Her work concentrates on the status of the women in the traditional bound, male-dominated middle class society of the contemporary India.
Balzac wrote in “Physiology of Marriage” pay no attention to a woman’s murmurs, her cries, her pains nature has made her for our use and for bearing everything, children, sorrows, blows and pains