Female Authors who don't get read enough, but should
- ANAIS NIN!!!! - Every book store you go to has a million Henry Miller books and none of hers, even though she's a much better writer! Erotica, diaries, novels, stories, everything!To get you in the mood for her books and life, watch HENRY AND JUNE, maybe the sexiest film ever made.
- ISAAK DINESEN - Dinesen led maybe the most fascinating life of any of these authors, part of which is captured in OUT OF AFRICA, the film. The book Out of Africa, is rather a gorgeous meditation on that land, which took me there more than any book about a place ever has. I felt like I was actually THERE. Dinesen largely subsumes herself to the environment and lets it become the main character, a quality I rarely find in male authors. Dinesen's short stories are also rich and strange, and feel like jeweled fairy stories that happen to be about adult lives and feature no fairytale characters. BABETTE'S FEAST is one of my favorites, and a very fine feature film by the same name is based on it.
- WILLA CATHER - Willa Cather does for the prairie what Wharton, below, did for the drawing room - definitively captures it. What's refreshing is that these novels don't feel like "prairie novels" so much as universal stories that take advantage of the prairie's harsh and changing landscape. Cather is also comfortable off the prairie. Her less-known book THE SONG OF THE LARK sees its heroine travel far and wide, and in my opinion, is a better read than O PIONEERS! or MY ANTONIA.
- EDITH WHARTON - Go beyond Ethan Frome (great in its own right) and you find a whole world captured under glass forever in her American society novels. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH is particularly great (pay no attention to the travesty of the film made of it), and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is splendid, better than its film, too, though Scorcese made a valiant effort.If women truly were equal in the eyes of American culture, Wharton might be considered the American master.
- MAY SARTON - A master of the journal, everyone should read Journal of a Solitude. All her journals, however, offer comfort, inspiration and humor in difficult times. Also, offers the older woman's perspective which I'm sure I will value more as I age.
- JEAN RHYSS - Wow! Rhyss, most well-known for the what if? Jane Eyre-related book, Wide Sargasso Sea, writes evocative landscapes, complex characters, believable emotions, and definitely from a point of view seldom heard from. An interesting spice to add to anyone's book collection.
I used to think that women and men truly were equal and that there was no further need for feminism. Then, after I began meditating, very angry and sad feelings emerged from down below. I started seeing that women are equal in the face of the law and for the most part in the workplace. But culturally, women's arts are still marginalized.
This isn't just evident in the sorry roles women usually get in movies (girlfriend, victim, wife) but in the way movies, books, etc. tend to be taken more seriously when they're about things like crime or war than when they're about subtler subjects such as relationships and love. Look at the Oscar winners of the past years for evidence.
Women authors, however, have gotten the worst deal. They are nearly always better at writing women, yet you see more men writing about women badly in the cannon than you do women writing about women (and often men) well. Dickens wrote lousy women, as did Hardy and Moll Flanders is just a piece of crap.
Anyway, these women could mop the floor with the lot of them and offer a priceless perspective to the uninitiated in women's literature.
yay! i agree with willa cather (song of the lark is one of my *favorite* books), edith wharton (age of innocence, anyone?) and banana yoshimoto.....though banana yoshimoto is probably the most accessible of the three, i think. both cather and wharton are very much writers of their time and place, and so i think are harder to get into now.
The only one of these I've read is some of Anais Nin. I've liked some of it, but her writing style doesn't do as much for me as it might. I loved Henry & June though, and keep picking up her stuff hoping I'll like it more. I haven't read the journals though.