Canons - One for Women Writers

 From Thornmfield Hall I plucked The Women’s Canon & the Clash of the Women’s Presses:

 Women’s best-sellers were wildly uneven in the 20th century. There was Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a novel about a one-night stand that ends brutally; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the famous novel that spawned the phrase “the zipless f*k”; and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which explores the effect of the Women’s Movement on an older married woman who returns to college and her fellow students.

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... The canon expanded to include women,  among them Virginia Woolf,  Kate Chopin,  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Rhys, Nora Zeale Hurston, and Toni Morrison.  Quite seriously, there were no women writers taught in the 20th-century literature classes when I first began at the university.

When I decided that I needed to fill in the holes of my education regarding writing, I started reading. Thinking of myself as a writer marginalized by age and geography, I found myself not just reading the classics I had ignored, but also writers from South America and Eastern Europe and Japan and women. Of the list above, I have not read Jean Rhys. I would add to the list above, the following:

• Joyce Carol Oates (friends will see that one coming)
• Margaret Atwood
• Karen Russell
• Willa Cather
• Eudora Welty
• Katherine Mansfield
• Edna O'Brien
• Muriel Spark
• Joan Didion
• Ursula K. LeGuin
• Jhumpa Lahiri.
• Amy Tan
• Jesmyn West
• Donna Tartt
• Elizabeth Strout
• Marilynne Robinson

Women who I think I should read:

• Doris Lessing
• Iris Murdoch
• Maxine Hong Kingston
• Jennifer Egan

For a more coherently reasoned list, there is 107 female authors everyone should read from Stylist.

Read and learn.

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