After promising in both the first part and then second part of this topic, here is my mea culpa as to why I have so few women writers on my site. Many years ago, soon after it came out, I read Gail Godwin‘s A Mother and Two Daughters. The book, at least in the United States, had done very well both critically and commercially. A couple of women friends said that I had absolutely had to read it and, being aware that I had not read enough women writers (though not suspecting that I would be doing a website and blog on literary matters), I did read it. It really did not work for me. In fact, to be quite honest, I hated it. I tried to read Elizabeth Taylor (the British writer not the British actress. You didn’t know that the actress was British? Born in Hampstead Garden Suburb, kept British citizenship all her life.) The Guardian, in the link, may call her brilliant. Loved the actress, found the novelist, well, boring. Barbara Pym? Same thing. I just did not get it.
When I started doing my website, I made a (very long) list of the writers I wanted to include, many of whom I had already read, many whom I had not. Though I never bothered checking, it is clear, with hindsight that the majority were men. This was not a conscious decision but just that the writers I thought most interesting were mainly men. No Godwin, no Taylor, no Pym, no chicklit. Since then, of course, I have added many, many writers to the list. I do now make something of conscious effort to seek out women writers but still find that most of the writers I want to read are men. This is partially for the reason explained in the previous post , namely that most canonical novelists do tend to be men (rightly or wrongly and, yes, I know, the canon is mainly set by men). As I also showed in my previous post this (unconscious) bias is also shared by women bloggers. Quick anecdote. We had a visit from a woman friend who works for a publisher. She complained that I had too few women writers on my site and said she would send me a list of women writers I should read. She sent the name of just one writer – a man.
When I became aware of my failings here, I tried to expiate my sins by having a women writers page on my site, with direct links to the women writers on my site. Setting up the links for this site helped me to find out about other women writers that I was not aware of. I have created a list of the best novels written by women on my site. There are some very fine works there and, I hope, some that not everyone is familiar with and that people coming to my site might be tempted to try and read (sadly a few are not available in English). However, knowing how infrequently I add a new name to the list of women writers on my site only brings home to me how few women writers there are on the site.
I spend a certain amount of time seeking out interesting new writers, mainly though not exclusively from other websites. I do try and to find interesting women writers on these sites and certainly I sometimes succeed. But I am not going to continue apologising for failing to do so. So there is no doubt that the ratio of men to women writers on this site will remain about the same. Quality is a highly subjective matter but, for me, many of the most interesting writers are male and while I will continue to read and enjoy women writers and will continue to post women’s novels on this site, men will predominate.