My Top 50 Influential Women Writers!

Apparently, the Guardian did some list of the 50 most influential writers last week.

Shockingly it was mostly white men. I know, you didn't see that coming at all. (sighs)

The lovely people at ForBooks Sake made an alternate list, of which I have not read anywhere near enough! I've only read 14 from their first list and 7 from the second. (jots down homework list)

This is my list of Some of the Most Influential Women Writers. It is heavy on children's literature.

But, I love children's fiction so I'm ignoring all criticism!

My List

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
Marilyn French's The Women's Room
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Bronte's Villette

Sapphire's Push
Sue Townsend's The Diary of Adrian Mole
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
Aminatta Forma's Ancestor Stones
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
L.M Montgomery Anne of Green Gables
Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel

Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of Rights of Women
Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
 Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider

Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk Auschwitz: True Tales of a Grotesque Land
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Kate Mosse's Labrynthe
Judy Bume Are You there God, It's Me Margaret (and Forever)
Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy
Beverly Cleary's Ramona
Anne Franks's Diary

Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse

Jean Little's Mine for Keeps
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time

Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did

Susan Faludi's Backlash:The Undeclared War Against Women

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Kris Radish's The Elegant Gathering of Snows

Germanise Greer's The Whole Woman

Cordekia Fine's Delusions of Gender

S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Alice Walker's The Colour Purple

Dale Spender's The Writing or the Sex

Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking

Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit

Enid Blyton's Famous Five

J.K. rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairies

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Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees

This is the best book I've read in ages and I've read some pretty freaking brilliant books lately. The Death of Bees was one of my random choices from the Edinburgh Book Festival. I always buy a few books by authors I've never heard of but this is the best one by far. It is triggering since it covers the systemic violence against women, particularly against those young girls who aren't considered "proper" victims but it is also beautiful, funny and full of hope.  It is the story of two sisters, Marnie and Nelly, struggling to survive in  a Glasgow housing estate without their parents, who they've just buried in a shallow grave in the backyard. They are victimised and revictimised in every manner possible and left to self-destruct by a welfare state that doesn't give a shit about poor kids from the housing estates. After all, when school is only "a convenient way for all of us to congregate in one place", it is obvious that these are the kids no one cares about (p.47). But, it's more than a litany of abuse. It's about surviving, friendships, the meaning of sisterhood and what really makes a family.

I don't tend to rate books but if I did, this one would have 5 stars. It's beautiful (as I said when I bored Twitter senseless whilst reading it).

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Edinburgh International Book Festival: Still Reinforcing Cultural Femicide

I think its fairly self-evident that I love reading; certainly anyone who follows me on twitter is bombarded daily with my witterings on my favourite books. I also love the Edinburgh International Book Festival but, every year, I am disappointed by how white male-centric the festival is. This year is no different. I complained here about the official catalogue which made it pretty self-evident how few women would be speaking at the Festival; and, of that small number of women, how many were children's authors. I love children's literature but women don't just write books for toddlers and teenagers. 

For a variety of reasons, yesterday was the first chance I've had to attend the Book Festival. I'd like to say I was surprised by the obvious display of cultural femicide but I wasn't. The vast majority of pictures of authors on display were male. In the bookstores, the vast majority of books on the special displays and tables were by men; including the children's bookstore. 

Now, I'm sure that the staff didn't consciously make the decision to prioritise men's writing but that's how insidious cultural femicide is.  The privileging of men's writing frequently happens at an unconscious level and is reinforced through the media and academia. The Book Festival's choice to hang mostly photos of male authors may seem a small point but it's the accumulation of such small decisions which harms women's writing. It is just as problematic as literature departments in universities only using one or two novels by women a course so as not to alienate male students. It's obviously not a problem to alienate the women students who, frequently, make up the majority of literature students in all languages.

The Festival's continuing privileging of male writers just reinforces the notion that women's writing is gender-specific and that fucks me off no end. As ever, I will fill in the comments box at the Festival [and the subsequent surveys] pointing out the erasure of women's writing but I don't expect things to change any time soon. After all, it would take someone seriously brave and radical to overhaul the Edinburgh Book Festival so it includes more than white men. I'm doing my part by only buying tickets to women writers and only buying books written by women.

These are the books I bought yesterday:

• Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees
• Monique Roffey's With the Kisses of His Mouth: A Memoir
• Pat Barker's Union Street
• Scarlett Thomas' Popco
• Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y
• Lisa Cacho's Slavery Inc. The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking
• Catherine Rayner's Sylvia and Bird
• Catherine Rayner's Ernest
• Sue Hendra's Barry the Fish With Fingers and the Hairy Scary Monster
• Kristina Stephenson's Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and the Tale of the Terrible Secret

The only author of adult books I've read before Monique Roffey's The White Woman on The Green Bicycle which is a bloody brilliant book. We already own all of Kristina Stephenson's Sir Charlie StinkySocks books and have seen her at the book festival in previous years. They are fab books.

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Marge Piercy's Right To Life

I've not read this poem before but it came up on my FB feed via Wipeout Misogyny. It is so incredibly beautiful and powerful.

Right To Life

A woman is not a pear tree thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity into the world. Even pear trees bear heavily in one year and rest and grow the next. An orchid gone wild drops a few warm rotting fruit in the grass but the trees stretch high and wiry, gifting the birds forty feet up among inch long thorns broken atavistically from the smooth wood.
A woman is nota basket you place your buns in to keep them warm. Not a broodhen you can slip duck eggs under.

Not the purse holding the coins of your descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest and interesting mutations in the tainted rain, any more than you are.
You plant corn and you harvest it to eat or sell. You put the lamb in the pasture to fatten and haul it into butcher for chops. You slice the mountain in two for a road and gouge the high plains for coal and the waters run muddy for miles and years.
Fish die but you do not call them yours unless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing, fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce.
You value children so dearly that none ever go hungry, none weep with no one to tend them when mothers work, none lack fresh fruit, none chew lead or cough to death and your orphanages are empty. Every noon the best restaurants serve poor children steaks.

At this moment at nine o'clock a partera is performing a table top abortion on an unwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die of tetanus and her little daughter will cry and be taken away.
Next door a husband and wife are sticking pins in the son they did not want. They will explain for hours how wicked he is, how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the rose of the womb we suckled our mother's blood and every baby born has a right to love like a seedling to sun.
Every baby born unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain.
A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomesof my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives.
I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind.

This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.

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Edinburgh Book Festival: Cultural Femicide at its Finest

The Edinburgh Book Festival catalogue has, once again, arrived by post. As ever, it's dominated by male authors. Lots and lots of men writing books and speaking about books and having important thoughts and questions about books. Granted, there are a number of women authors represented in photos but that's clearly an advertising fudge. At least, I think its a fudge. I haven't actually bothered to count the number of male and female authors attending and then do some fancy maths comparing them with the photographic representations. But, I'm pretty confident that the women authors are disproportionately represented in the photographs of the festival than women authors are actually speaking at it.

In fact, most of the women authors seem to be children's authors. Now, I'm a huge fan of children's fiction [except for Twilight and books about magic ponies. Those are just all kinds of awful] but we all know that in the world of literature, children's fiction just doesn't quite cut it which is unfortunate as, apparently, J.K Rowling is one of the only billionaires in the UK who actually pay proper income tax. [Not that I'm suggesting anyone who hasn't read all her books needs to run out tomorrow to buy them, but a brilliant woman author who pays tax? The Tories won't find one of them]. Children's literature is dominated by dead, white men. Newer, more popular, children's books are derided as rubbish and dull. The Harry Potter books, some of the best-selling books ever, are frequently dismissed with "at least, it gets boys reading book". Talk about damning with faint praise. Now, I do happen to think that there are a lot of children's authors who write literature [as opposed to popular fiction which I enjoy just as much]. Women like Kit Pearson, Jean Little and Madeleine L'Engle write literature [however poncily you want to define that term]. Authors like Jacqueline Wilson, who is a constant presence at EBF and financially successful to boot, are relegated by snobbery to being unimportant. The dismissal of books aimed at children is part of cultural femicde because it denies the very power and success women writers have with audiences of children, who are just as critical about the quality of books as adults are.

There are some incredible women authors attending EBF. I'm looking forward to Caroline Moorhead's The Resistance Women Who Survived Auschwitz. I am interested in the contested definitions of resistance as is applied to the Holocaust and how the label of "resister/resistance" is culturally appropriated or denied depending on political context, who has the right to label themselves resister and who has the right label others as resister. This debate is clearly played out publicly in discussions over Fania Fenelon's memoir Playing for Time; a book which is both feted for its honestly and critiqued for its rewriting of history. I'm also looking forward to Jeanette Winterson, Kate Summerscale and Monique Roffrey. I have, for the past few years, tried only to see women authors speak but it is difficult, particularly when one is starting from a feminist position.

Interestingly, and totally opposite to the rest of my ranting about the EBF in general, is the Anobii First Book Award given to either writers of their first book or overseas authors whose book has just been translated into English. This award seems to have gender parity which raises some interesting questions. I don't actually know how authors are selected; if they volunteer or are chosen by committee. However, if they are chosen, then it does seem like the emphasis on "Important Male Authors" is a deliberate [if subconscious] policy. It also reflects an ageism since the women writers nominated for the Anobii prize are all very young, reflecting both their status as first-time published authors but also, perhaps, an acknowledgement of the cultural femicide inherent in the book industry. At least, I hope so. Either way, the Anobii prize is quite odd considered the gendered nature of the rest of the event.

And, finally, I'm also slightly perplexed by the keynote question which is "should literature be political?" How, precisely, can someone argue that it isn't. Even the drivel which is Twlight [and it is serious fucking misogynistic drivel about loving your abusive boyfriend and cutting out all your friends and family so he doesn't hurt you] is political. Hell, its the ultimate Patriarchal Handmaiden text written by a Mormon evangelising the no sex before marriage bullshit which works out so well for society. Literature is, and always has been, political; as much when it focuses on the private lives of individuals as it does on the public political and cultural structures of society. Also, the panel to discuss it seems to include no one in possession of a vagina. Obviously, because women never write books about political issues.

I do love EBF. I love the hope they maintain every year in holding the festival in a bunch of tents in Charlotte Square. I love the fact that its a mud swamp by day three. I love the whimsy involved in tossing random rubber ducks into the swamp for decorative purposes. Most of all, I love the fact that the slide show shown before every session only contains pictures of lovely literary people having picnics in the grass on the one day a year that the festival isn't a mud swamp. You can't argue with that level of cognitive dissonance. Yet, every year I'm disappointed by the lack of women writers, by the lack of overtly feminist writers. As a general rule of thumb, EBF is a lovely day out with a great bookstore but the Independent Radical Bookfare held in October has a greater variety of authors and a better gender parity.

Oh, and before I get any pissy comments telling me to calm down or that I'm over-reacting, women buy more books than men. Women read more books than men. There are more women involved in the publishing industry than men and it's women's volunteer labour which makes many book festivals possible. We should expect gender parity in book festivals when the vast majority of people involved in the industry have vaginas.

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Loving Aurora Teagarden [and Looking For Recommendations of Series Featuring Strong Women]

I've been boring Twitter senseless with my updates on loving the Aurora Teagarden books by Charlaine Harris. They are Harris' first series and aren't her best books but she does touch on the themes which make the True Blood so fascinating: feminism, racism, manners, homophobia and constraining social structures which punish those who don't fit. The character of Aurora Teagarden isn't quite as fun or feminist as Sookie Stackhouse who, above all else, is a real fighter and an incredible woman who knows herself. Aurora Teagarden is still stuck in the marriage/baby rigamarole, despite her interest in solving old murders and subsequent accidental involvement in solving current murders. They are both strong female characters though and there can never be enough strong, quirky, intelligent and interesting women characters in books. 

Some of my favourite characters in book series, in no particular order, are: 

• Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum
• Dorothy Gilman's Mrs Pollifax: elderly widow gets bored and joins the CIA. As you do.
• Agatha Christie's Miss Marple
• M.C Beaton's Agatha Raisin via LeBof
• Charlaine Harris' Lily Barb [there is a pattern to this one!]
• Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple
• J.D Robb's Lt Eve Dallas
• Elizabeth Peters' Vicki Bliss
• Alison Gordon's Kate Henry

I'm always looking for more recommendations for series.

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