Lists
by Emily B., February 28, 2020 9:25 AM
Women authors, particularly queer authors and authors of color, have frequently been relegated to the dustbin of history while their male contemporaries have been added to the Western canon and taught in classrooms ad infinitum. Some women are successful in their lifetimes, but, overshadowed by their male contemporaries, fall out of print and the collective consciousness after their deaths. Others languish in obscurity during their most prolific years and find recognition only at the end of their lives; or, they are recognized posthumously, when the mores of society catch up with them. In celebration of Women’s History Month, here are seven authors who were underappreciated in their lifetimes, or who were forgotten and deserve to be better known.
Nawal El Saadawi
An Egyptian feminist, activist, cofounder of the Arab Association for Human Rights, and prolific writer, Saadawi has a bibliography spanning more than six decades and 50 works. She has won numerous international peace awards for her activism, but has also been subjected to intense political persecution. Her straightforward discussion of female genital mutilation led to an almost 20-year ban of her book Women and Sex in Egypt, and she was imprisoned in 1981 for assisting with the publication of a feminist magazine. Her writing has been translated into more than 30 languages, but she is still not as well known outside of the Arab world as she deserves to be. Saqi Books is releasing three of her novels (Zeina, The Fall of the Imam, and Two Women in One) in English language editions in the first half of 2020, so now is the perfect time to add her to your reading list.
Lucia Berlin
Lucia Berlin mixed her difficult, remarkable personal history — spanning three marriages, four children, alcoholism, health problems, and sobriety — with fiction to create masterful, fragmentary short stories. A mentee of Ed Dorn, she published a number of collections to critical acclaim, and won an American Book Award in 1991, but was not well known outside of a niche literary audience during her lifetime. In 2015, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Short Stories debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and introduced her to a wider audience for the first time, 11 years after her death. Her collections have since been translated into 21 languages.
Djuna Barnes
A well-known member of the Modernist literature movement in Paris during the 1920s and ’30s, Barnes never garnered the lasting legacy afforded to many of her contemporaries. She is now best known for her novel Nightwood, which deserves to be read much more widely. A cult classic of lesbian literature, Nightwood is a searing novel of homosexual and heterosexual heartbreak that T. S. Eliot described as “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.”
Clarice Lispector
In 2015, the adoration and acclaim surrounding the publication of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories was so fervent you could be forgiven for thinking that the book represented the breakout success of a new literary wunderkind. In reality, Clarice Lispector was a wunderkind; her novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was just 23... in 1943. Her works were popular in Brazil during her lifetime, but it was only after her death at just 56 years old in 1977 that she was recognized as one of Brazil’s most important modern novelists, and it wasn’t until after the publication of Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector in 2009 that English-speaking readers took serious notice of the author that Moser calls “the most important Jewish writer since Kafka.”
Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen was a prominent writer of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the first Black woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, but she withdrew from literary life in the 1930s and was largely forgotten. Unlike many of the authors on this list, her output was not prodigious, but the two novels (Passing and Quicksand) and handful of short stories that she did produce are nuanced, complex examinations of race and sexuality that should have earned her a lasting legacy. A revival of academic interest in her works, and a backlash against the premise of Passing, followed the 1980s republication of her novels, but a wider recognition of her importance has been slow to materialize.
Anzia Yezierska
Yezierska emigrated from Poland to Manhattan’s Lower East Side with her family in 1895 at the age of 15. In her short stories, she chronicles the lives of Jewish and Puerto Rican immigrants, exploring the elusiveness of the American Dream and the cost of assimilation. One of her early short story collections, Hungry Hearts, was adapted into a silent movie in 1922, but her fame and recognition was short-lived. Today her novel Bread Givers is considered a classic novel of Jewish immigration.
Anne Lister
Sometimes referred to as “the first modern lesbian,” Anne Lister kept a diary — now titled The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister — chronicling her relationships, social events, politics, and interests from 1806 until her death in 1840. The four-million word diary, originally written in code, depicts a woman who led an openly lesbian lifestyle and includes detailed accounts of her love affairs with women. The diary was almost destroyed after her death when one of its first decipherers discovered its contents and advised that it be burned, but it survived, hidden behind a panel, and in 2011 was added to the register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. Lister and her diary were the inspiration for the current HBO show Gentleman Jack.
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