50 Great Women Writers — how many have you heard of?
February 4, 2013 at 10:35 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 10 CommentsTags: books, literary canon, Robert McCrum, Women, women writers
Dear Guardian newspaper,
We note that your books editor, Robert McCrum, has published a ‘partisan list’ of 50 turning points in literature, and that comments have remarked on the low numbers of women (7).
To begin redressing the gender balance, here is another list – even more partisan, in that it consists entirely of influential women writers. (McCrum’s original choices are in red.)
Here are those 50 great, pioneering women.
Yours,
Kathleen Taylor (science writer) & Gillian Wright (senior lecturer in English literature)
1.Julian of Norwich: Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393; thought to be the first book written in English by a woman)
2.Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies (1405; this courtly French poet wrote about women’s roles and emphasized their positive contributions to society)
3.Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe (1436; women can do autobiography)
4.Mary Sidney: Psalms (c. 1599; her paraphrases of the Psalms were as good as or better than her brother Philip’s)
5.Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World (1666; women can do science-fiction, long before that term was invented)
6.Lucy Hutchinson: The Life of Colonel Hutchinson (c. 1673; women can do biography)
7.Anne Bradstreet: Severall Poems (1678; Bradstreet is often called ‘the first American poet’)
8.Aphra Behn: Orinooko (1688; pioneering playwright and poet who showed that women can make a living from writing)
9.Mary Astell: A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694; Astell advocated a university for women)
10.Anne Finch: The Spleen (1701; a pioneer woman writer on mental illness)
11.Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quixote (1752; women can do satire)
12.Elizabeth Carter: All the Works of Epictetus (1758; women can translate the classics)
13.Mary Wortley-Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters (c. 1761; women can do travel writing)
14.Catherine Macaulay: The History of England (1763-1783; women can do history)
15.Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
16.Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794; women can do Gothic fiction)
17.Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent (1800; invents the regional novel in English)
18.Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813)
19.Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818; women can do enduring horror stories)
20.Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Cry of the Children (1842; this poem helped bring about reforms to child labour in England)
21.Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847)
22.Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847; set the pattern for many a romantic novel)
23.Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
24.Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)
25.Florence Nightingale: Notes on Nursing (1859; women can do medicine)
26.Mrs Beeton: The Book of Household Management (1861; women can do really popular cookery books)
27.Julia Ward Howe: The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861; women can do political propaganda)
28.George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)
29.Edith Sitwell: Façade (1922-3; women can do surrealism)
30.Emily Dickinson: Complete Poems (1924; women can do poetry)
31.Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (1929; women can be revolutionaries)
32.Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth (1933; women can do war memoirs)
33.Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express (1934; women can do detective fiction, and how)
34.Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941; women can do travel writing)
35.Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (1949; women can do philosophy)
36.Iris Murdoch: Under the Net (1954; this prolific philosopher-novelist showed how varied a woman’s writing can be)
37.Rachel Carson: Silent Spring (1962; pioneering and vastly influential work of environmentalism)
38.Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962; women can chronicle political and social change)
39.Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar (1963; women can write starkly about mental illness)
40.Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch (1970; feminist bestseller)
41.Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1979; women can do dark things with fairy tales)
42.Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; women can do dystopian fiction)
43.Jeanette Winterson: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985; lesbian fiction goes mainstream)
44.Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987; women can reshape American fiction)
45.Pat Barker: Regeneration (1991; women can do war fiction)
46.Kay Redfield Jamison: An Unquiet Mind (1995; women can do psychiatry)
47.JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
48.Catherine Millet: The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2002; women can write explicitly about sex)
49.EL James: 50 Shades of Grey (2012; women can do soft as well as hard porn)
50.Hilary Mantel: Bring up the Bodies (2012; women can win prizes. Even the Booker. Twice.)
Kathleen Taylor, author of Brainwashing, Cruelty, and The Brain Supremacy
Website: http://www.neurotaylor.com, Twitter: @neurotaylor
Gillian Wright, author of Producing Women’s Poetry
Website: http://earlymoderngillian.blogspot.co.uk, Twitter: @gwrightbham
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