Margaret Atwood remembers being devastated by this movie, but unlike many young girls of her time, she escaped its underlying message. Sustained by a strong sense of herself, Margaret Atwood achieved a stratospheric literary career. How did a young girl, in those pre-feminist days, create the instinctive capacity to believe in herself? As pre-eminent biographer Rosemary Sullivan says: "The answer has to do with the mystery of self-confidence".

Self-confidence is just one fascinating side of our most famous literary export, examined by Rosemary Sullivan in The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood/Starting Out. Not a biography, but a portrait of a woman and her generation -- this is the unfolding of an enigma. For despite her tremendous success that transcends the literary community, catapulting her into the realm of a "household name", Margaret Atwood has remained very much a private person with a public persona. Rosemary Sullivan reveals the discrepancy between Atwood's cool, acerbic public image and the down-to-earth, straight-dealing and generous woman who actually writes the books. Throughout, she weaves the issues of female creativity, authority and autonomy set against the backdrop of a generation of women coming of age during one of the most radically shifting times in contemporaryhistory.