15 Great Authors Who Just Happen To Be Female

I do my very best to dodge, ignore and otherwise avoid the social media games that surreptitiously appear in my daily Facebook feed, choosing not to sow seeds in imaginary farms or ponder my autistic tendencies on a gliding scale. But it’s hard for a lifelong reader and bibliophile to pass up a chance to list and/or rank the authors or works that have stubbornly lodged themselves into my skull and to compare my choices with those of equally enthusiastic friends boasting long lists of their own.

So when the following challenge appeared in the status updates of several acquaintances -

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, list your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.)

- I had to play along, and not just because I had earlier in the week posted a photographic spread of unapologetic bookporn to my photo blog. It was an interesting exercise, because it forces one to set aside authors one merely respects in favor of those one truly adores, which can make for some interesting company. I discovered, for example, that the sports/psychological breakdown semi-memoir A Fan’s Notes by one-shot writer Frederick Exley has continued to haunt and trouble me since I stumbled across it midway through college - more so than other obviously important cultural touchstones like Joyce’s Ulysses or Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. And seeing how the decidedly ambiguous memories of reading A Fan’s Notes so easily and insistently entered my mind, Exley went on the list while Joyce and Pynchon did not. Crazy, I know.

I’ll stand by my fifteen choices, even as the lists compiled by friends reveals authors I skipped over that should have made the grade (how could I deny the impact made by Hunter S. Thompson or Franz Kafka on my literary sensibilities?). But more interesting to me than any list was the comment made by a friend as an addendum to her own list of fifteen favorites – “I need to read more female authors,” following a not-at-all-exclusively-male list (although still pretty male-dominated with 11 male vs. 4 female authors represented). I was struck by this because of similar thoughts I’ve been having about the role played by gender when evaluating works of art. The recent fracas over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom brought this into sharp relief, especially when the fracas had less to do with Franzen himself and more to do with the critical accolades and reviewing attention bestowed upon Freedom while the works of other equally notable yet female authors went, so the argument went, unnoticed.

This debate seemed more than a little disingenuous, for several reasons, almost none of which have anything to do with the very real fact that female artists undoubtedly receive less attention and respect than their male counterparts. Had truly obscure or neglected authors stepped forward to point out the egregious double standards at play in the world of literary reviewing, the grievance might have proved easier to swallow. But when the put-upon wordsmiths inveighing against “white male literary darlings” arrive in the guise of Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, one must take a step back. While neither Picoult nor Weiner could be easily dismissed as purveyors of tripe, to confuse them with engaged, committed, and challenging authors is to degrade the profession. With Picoult having sold 14 million copies of her books and Weiner an estimated 11 million, it’s difficult to conjure much sympathy for their tales of woe in a landscape where a small-press poetry publication is considered “respectable” if it breaks 500 copies in sales. And finally, while the argument is certainly worth having, Franzen seems an odd choice to attack when discussing the relative dearth of female authors in the canon, as he has repeatedly gone on record expressing the same concerns, has written several lovely essays or reviews filled with fulsome praise for neglected female authors (his lengthy June 2010 essay in the New York Times on the relatively forgotten Christina Stead and her unique 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children is an impassioned rave), and tends to fill his novels with extremely remarkable and sympathetically crafted female characters – far more so than the vast majority of his male contemporaries.

I recognize that Picoult and Weiner were taking aim primarily at the fact that Franzen was reviewed twice by the same publication in the span of a few weeks, but again, I fail to see the outrage in this – after all, Franzen tends to publish large, multifaceted novels once every decade, while both Picoult and Weiner seem to deliver relatively slimmer novels every twelve months or so. Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that – Philip Roth does the same thing, as does Joyce Carol Oates (although her yearly efforts are far from slim). But to sit atop yearly successful releases and accuse a writer as thoughtful as Franzen of nefarious deeds in support of cultural patriarchy is pretty ridiculous. And upon further reflection, I was wrong about Weiner, at least (not so sure about Picoult). Her oeuvre actually does look pretty tripe-like.

And yet. To ponder how the literary establishment and critical gatekeepers evaluate the literary landscape – to examine who and what they corral off into “great works of art” and “admirable examples of craft” – is to observe a clear line of demarcation that tends to separate, shall we say, the boys from the girls. That is, the very notion of what certain critics and reviewers (and readers, it must be noted) deem as the hallmarks of a literary masterpiece are those very qualities that one might define, however imperfectly, as “male”. It goes without saying that many male authors and their heartiest backers maintain an obsession with length and girth that would seem to be little removed from their early encounters in the locker room. While female writers undoubtedly appreciate length and girth as much as the next woman, they also seem to have developed a healthier approach to winnowing out its limitations – how a hefty volume can sometimes obscure the relative emptiness inside, or the way an author may pad out two or three interesting ideas with hundreds of pages of extraneous and often less-than-enthralling detail. To glance over the handful of tightly-sprung, perfectly selected paragraphs of a Lydia Davis short story, say, is to marvel at the work of a master unafraid to pare subjects down to the bone. To flip through the one thousand and thirty pages of Adam Levin’s new McSweeney’s release The Instructions is to be impressed and also to wonder what Maxwell Perkins is doing these days.

I have no desire to venture any further into a topic as fraught with misstep as the perennial “how are male writers different from female writers,” and not only because I suspect it’s a useless discussion. It would be far more productive to instead list fifteen authors of the last century that have indeed been unfairly overlooked by the literary establishment and who all are amazing and talented writers who just happen to have the good fortune of being female. “Historical” authors have been left out of the list, which explains the lack of Jane Austen and George Eliot. I’ve also chosen to ignore those writers which have broken through the glass ceiling and regularly get tossed about with any number of male greats – Joyce Carol Oates, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood. The list is in no way exhaustive or complete or anything other than introductory. However, all fifteen authors display stunning erudition and emotional complexity, possess unique and wonderfully composed prose styles, and tackle subjects ranging from personal psychology to ancient myth. They will all add immeasurably to your life. And they are all much, much better than Jodi Picoult or Jennifer Weiner (and Jonathan Safran Foer).

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(ranked alphabetically, to avoid any sense of relative comparison)

1) Anne Carson

A professor of classics with equal interest in the world of graphic arts, anthropology, and literature, Carson is less a traditional poet than a translator who decodes existing texts into an artful whole, and less a traditional translator than a poet eager to dissect the imperfection of words into a messy yet enthralling cross-section of tradition. Her careful resurrection of the scattered fragments of the Ancient Greek poet Sappho is something to lose yourself in. Her accordion-fold collage-poem NOX, released earlier this year, is a facsimile of an art piece she created following the death of her estranged brother. She could be icy cool, with an intellectual sheen painful to contemplate. But she remains earthbound, generous, always mindful of the reader.

Recommended works: The Beauty of the Husband (2001); If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002); NOX (2010).

2) Kathryn Davis

An American far more likely to channel Danish folk tales or the court of Marie Antoinette than contemporary yankee landscapes, Davis is a decidedly quirky – no, make that bizarre – chronicler of the uncanny and the just-slightly absurd. But her novels never devolve into mere whimsy. Think of her as having the heart of a Celtic balladeer who just happens to be working in prose and once taught at Skidmore.

Recommended works: The Girl Who Trod On A Loaf (1993); The Thin Place (2006).

3) Lydia Davis

One could spend most of this space extolling the virtues of Davis’ eye-opening translations of Proust and Flaubert, but to ignore her equally great achievements in the realm of short stories would be obscene. Perhaps astonishingly, Davis seems to effortlessly straddle the world of unique, scholarly translation (in French) and unique, postmodern prose (her short stories). Blasting the tradition of 80s minimalism clear out of the water, her stories at times are less than three sentences long – “some of them among the shortest ever written,” as admirer Dan Chiasson noted. But never glib. Think John Cage, think Samuel Beckett, and hope that someday she easily coexists with those giants. With her entire short story output now available in one volume, there’s no reason she can’t.

Recommended works: Swann’s Way (2004), trans.; The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009).

4) Joan Didion

Another uncategorizable writer, whose output has veered contentedly between journalistic essays and piercing fiction, we have no better voice on the contradictory nature of the state that is California than Didion. Her political essays are impressionistic pieces nevertheless immersed in detail and detached outrage. And her exploration of death and mourning in The Year of Magical Thinking has few equals. Long after the metafictional experiments of the big boys from the 1960s have faded away, Didion’s work stands as some of the finest prose put to paper during that heated decade. And in many ways, she’s only gotten better.

Recommended works: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968); Play It As It Lays (1970); The White Album (1979); Where I Was From (2003); The Year Of Magical Thinking (2005).

5) Elaine Dundy

Given her tumultuous childhood and lifelong struggles against domineering men, Dundy could be forgiven had she chosen an output of morbid observations. Lucky for her and lucky for us, she chose morbid wit, instead, and her cult 1958 novel of an American girl abroad, The Dud Avocado, seems to trickle back into the mainstream every generation or so. She wrote other equally admirable books, including a 1985 mock-bio of Elvis that ranks up there with the best, but it’s her creation of Sally Jay Gorce that she’ll be remembered for. This charming novel is the unacknowledged genesis of Sex And The City, and while that might not sound like much of a recommendation, it stands as one nonetheless.

Recommended works: The Dud Avocado (1958); The Old Man and Me (1964); Elvis and Gladys (1985).



6) Deborah Eisenberg

While Raymond Carver casts a deep shadow across the short story landscape, I suspect the form would be in much healthier straits if writers swapped out Carver’s easily-copied brand of minimalism for the unique approach of either the aforementioned Lydia Davis or Deborah Eisenberg. For the past twenty-five years, Eisenberg has been calmly releasing masterful collections of stories brimming with novelistic detail and utterly believable character studies. Her work celebrates the individual nature of people and families while always acknowledging the darkness and pain that comes along with such individuality. Her eye for the emptiness of American landscapes and the ways in which Americans hope to fill them places her obviously in the contemporary literary scene, but she has set an equally large number of stories in South America – an “exotic” setting that never feels strained. The recent collection of her entire output into one affordable volume is cause for celebration.

Recommended works: The Collected Stories (2010).


7) Mary Gaitskill

Try to forget that one of Gaitskill’s characters was the inspiration for the 2002 sado-lite film Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhall – if only because the film timidly approached then scurried away from topics Gaitskill fearlessly tears into. Quite frankly, she’s a writer who says things other writers won’t, unless those other writers are Michel Houellebecq or, um, Michel Houellebecq. She disdains the prettified metaphor, draws unforgivably brutal portraits of scarred young women, and thinks sex is dirty and really fun (and at times really awful) because it is dirty. She is not for everybody. She is one of my favorites.

Recommended works: Bad Behavior (1988); Two Girls, Fat And Thin (1991); Veronica (2005); Don’t Cry (2009).



8) Tove Jansson

Damion Searls recently attempted to explain to American readers how remarkable the career of Swedish / Finnish novelist Tove Jansson really was. She was not only one of the most gifted and beloved illustrators and composers of children’s stories from the last hundred years, but an equally legendary master of adult fiction. Searles writes, “It is as though Jonathan Franzen not only admired Charles Schulz but was Charles Schulz, retired from comic strips and deciding to try his hand at a family novel”. Perhaps you’re already familiar with the magical world of the Moomin books, perhaps not. At the very least, readers suddenly enthralled by Swedish fiction in the Year Of Stieg Larssen would do well to seek out Jansson’s novels – Scandinavian prose of a far calmer yet equally unforgiving bent.

Recommended works: The Summer Book (1972); The True Deceiver (1982); Fair Play (1989).


9) Pauline Kael

As the tradition of film criticism slowly slumps off to the great beyond, it can be hard to imagine a time when an idiosyncratic writer was allowed to explore at great length opinions running sharply counter to the grand narrative of the day. Here was a feisty and disarmingly witty woman capable of catching the whiff of bullshit emanating from the artiste and exploitation salesman alike – she gagged at both The Sound of Music and Michelangelo Antonioni. She embraced onscreen brutality when she found it to be earned (some Peckinpah), denounced it when she found it contrived (Dirty Harry). Her colorful curses were edited out by William Shawn, her celebration of feminine carnality tsk-tsked by New Yorker readers. If you only watched the films she praised, you’d be missing out on some great cinema. And yet there’s more honesty, passion, and insight (not to mention wonderful writing) in her criticism than can be found in the efforts of Clement Greenberg and Theodore Adorno combined.

Recommended works: For Keeps (1994)



10) Lorrie Moore

Leaven your writings with too little wit, and you stand in danger of being dismissed as mirthless. Become too fond of the bon mot or the witty aside, and you stand the equal danger of being damned with faint praise as a humorist. Moore has managed to walk the tightrope of comedy and tragedy through a small yet impressive body of work that stands alone in American fiction for its self-deprecation and an almost tourette’s-like inability to avoid a good pun. Her latest novel suffers only when Moore tries too hard to sweep current American history along with her mannered oddities. But the short stories remain sublime.

Recommended works: Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? (1994); Birds Of America (1998); A Gate At The Stairs (2009).




11) Iris Murdoch

A philosopher who deigned to write fiction, or a fiction writer eerily adept at philosophy? Dame Murdoch was perhaps both, and one would be hard pressed to nominate fellow writers equally capable of composing luminous, thoughtful fiction while pondering the weighty matters of 20th century philosophy. Sartre, maybe? Camus? At any rate, it’s not a long list. Where to begin with a writer with over twenty-five novels to her name, novels that both parody and celebrate such matters as religious faith, erotic obsession, poverty, domination, and intellectual wonderings. Why not start at the beginning, and work forward?

Recommended works: The Bell (1958); A Severed Head (1961); The Black Prince (1973); The Sea, The Sea (1978).


12) Flannery O’Connor

You can keep Stephenie Meyer and her young-adult vampiric concerns. If I want a jolt of Gothic horror, I’ll take Flannery, thanks. If Edward and Bella romantically swoon to the rhythms of the undead, O’Connor’s doomed characters crawl out of a fetid mixture equal parts southern backwoods and Catholic guilt. Prosthetic limbs get stolen post-coitus, bulls gore hapless victims among blades of grass, and oversize statues of racist iconography loom out of the kudzu. It’s wrong to focus on the grotesque nature of O’Connor’s stories and novels at the expense of her very real concerns of the possibility of achieving divine grace, yet even these aspects are colored with a unique and deeply morbid sense of humor. In the end, she towers above both regionalism and southern gothic. She belongs to literature, full stop.

Recommended works: Wise Blood (1952); A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955); The Violent Bear It Away (1960); Everything That Rises Must Coverge (1965).



13) Cathleen Schine

Yet another example of the lengths to which the literary establishment will go to shut out those authors daring to tread in the semi-bastard zone of comedy and farce, the comic novels of Cathleen Schine deserve wider acceptance and adulation. Who but a comic writer would think to pen a novel of a nineteen-year-old girl’s lengthy stay in a hospital and rehabilitation center’s bed, and actually make it funny? Without a dose of self-pity? And entitle it Alice In Bed? Likewise, a story like Rameau’s Niece, in which a historian translating Diderot becomes overtaken by the manuscript and begins to view life through sex-obsessed lenses, might only be conjured up by a writer willing to embrace farcical convention and unafraid of the so-called “happy ending”. One races enjoyably through her books, only later stopping to consider Schine’s powers of craft and storytelling.

Recommended works: Alice In Bed (1983); Rameau’s Niece (1993); She Is Me (2003).



14) Muriel Spark

Standing proof that a-new-book-each-year need not imply endless chaff or gristle, Spark’s releases flew fast and furious, and her mid-life religious conversion led her to embrace an odd and unique worldview – a worldview that seemed ever mindful of the spiritual goings-on in a world not quite unlike our own, yet far more interested in the upheavals of the Final Judgment than any paradise in the hereafter. Which is not to say she was completely nihilistic. Call her cruelly refined, or just a little warped. Throughout her long career, she never ceased marveling at the indignities humans heap upon one another, and it would take an obnoxious little Pollyanna indeed to fend off the accuracy of Spark’s barbs.

Recommended works: Memento Mori (1959); The Public Image (1968); The Driver’s Seat (1970); The Abbess Of Crewe (1974); The Takeover (1976).



15) Christa Wolf

If a reinterpretation of the Battle of Troy as a decisive shift away from matriarchal tradition sounds to you like the keynote speech at a literary critic’s conference, I wouldn’t disagree too strenuously. But seeing how the former East German writer Christa Wolf is not only a literary critic but a gifted novelist, you’d be wrong to dismiss it as a dull conceit. One might describe her as rather ponderously aware of history, until one notes that anybody spied on by the Stasi for over thirty years would do well to remember the more ponderous lessons of history. Yet she never despairs, and she never condescends. Among the corpses of East German literature lies her warmly beating heart.

Recommended works: Divided Heaven (1963); Cassandra (1984); What Remains (1990).