As readers pointed out, my last list was rather skewed to a male-dominated tradition. Here is an alternative perspective
Check these out ... The Women's Library in
London. Photograph: Teri Pengilley
Last week's post about the
50 turning-points of English (and American) literature stirred up quite a
bit of debate, raising some interesting issues. One of the big complaints about
my selection was the inadequate representation of women writers. This blog has
been admittedly slow to engage with the gender politics of literature, but this
challenge – what about the women ? – is self-evidently a fair question.
My previous list (and it
was only a list) reflected patriarchal values, and a male-dominated literary
culture. That's hard to avoid, in the light of history. But, as Kathleen Taylor and
Gillian
Wright have shown, there is another story, a different way of looking at our
cultural bibliography.
And so, 50 years to the day since the death of Sylvia Plath, here is my alternative Anglo-American list of the 50 women writers who shaped our literary landscape – a list constructed with no conferring on my part with any other pre-existing catalogue.
I have followed, so far as
possible, the same criteria: basically, the impact of the individual writer, or
her book, on literary history. For the record, this new catalogue joins an archipelago of
related literary lists.
As before, I've taken
Shakespeare (not Chaucer) as the starting point. So I open with the
extraordinary Aphra Behn.
To go back into medieval times, takes us into the continental Latin tradition,
about which – full disclosure – I know almost nothing.
One obvious point that emerges from this catalogue is that from roughly 1900 and the emancipation of women (followed by the dynamic effects of two world wars), the historical imbalance starts to be redressed. Before 1900, any list of women writers (poets, playwrights and novelists) is virtually self-selecting. After 1900, it becomes competitive, and contentious – as it should be. There are no free rides up Parnassus.
1. Aphra Behn: Orinooko, (1668)
2. Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter and Delariviere Manley: The Female Wits (1696)
3. Mary Wortley Montagu: Letters and poems (c1720)
4. Mary Scott: The Female Advocate (1774)
5. Fanny Burney: Evalina (1778)
6. Hannah More: Sacred Dramas (1782)
7. Dorothy Wordsworth: Grasmere Journal (c. 1790)
8. Mary
Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
9. Maria Edgeworth; Castle Rackrent (1800)
10. Mary Hays: Female Biography (1803)
11. Jane Austen: Emma
(1815)
12. Mary Shelley:
Frankenstein (1818)
13 Fanny Trollope: The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)
14. Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1847-48)
15. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1854)
16. Mrs Beeton: Book of Household Management (1861)
17. Charlotte M Yonge: Biographies of Good Women (1862)
18. Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (1868)
19. Emily Dickinson: Poems
(c1870)
20. George Eliot: Middlemarch
(1871)
21. Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
22. Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903)
23. E Nesbit: The Railway Children (1906)
24. Katherine Mansfield: In A German Pension (1911)
25. Rebecca West: The Return of The Soldier (1918)
26. Dorothy Parker (c1920-1935)
27. Agatha Christie: The
Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)
28. Ivy Compton Burnett: Pastors and Masters (1925)
29. Virginia Woolf: A Room
of One's Own (1929)
30. Antonia White: Frost in May (1933)
31. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (1938)
32. Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
33. Dodie Smith: I Capture The Castle (1949)
34. Josephine Tey: Daughter of Time (1951)
35. Elizabeth David: French Country Cooking (1951)
36. Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
37. Sylvia Plath: The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
38. Muriel Spark: The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
39. Mary McCarthy: The Group (1962)
40. Doris Lessing: The
Golden Notebook (1962)
41. Jean Rhys: The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
42. Germaine Greer: The
Female Eunuch (1970)
43. Elizabeth Taylor: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)
44. PD James: An Unsuitable Job
for a Woman (1972)
45. Iris Murdoch: The Black
Prince (1973)
46. Beryl Bainbridge: The
Bottle Factory Outing (1974)
47. Angela Carter: The
Bloody Chamber (1979)
48. Marilynne
Robinson: Housekeeping (1980)
49. Carol Ann Duffy:
"Whoever She Was" (1983)
50. Julia Donaldson: The
Gruffalo (1999)
Plus a bonus:
JK Rowling: Harry Potter
and the Philosopher's Stone (1995)
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