The XX Factor: What women really think.

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  Women Writers, cont.

  Posted Wednesday, March 04, 2009 10:30 AM | By Dayo Olopade
  The Guardian has published a list of 1,000 novels to read before you die. As it should, the list contains, for me, some beloved texts—and some totally unheard of. In search of a riff on your post on domesticity-vs.-sweeping drama, Meghan, I perused the list for signs of gender difference.
  
  Evelyn Waugh, easily one of my favorite authors (and not, as I discovered in high school, a woman), gets eight nods; I totally agree with such praise, but even the most decorated female (Jane Austen) gets only six. A full accounting was too taxing for today, but males do dominate the “war and travel,” “science fiction and fantasy,” and “crime” categories. Throughout, Carson McCullers, George Eliot, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Elizabeth Gaskell keep things interesting, but the only category that approaches gender parity is in “love” (at least it’s not all chick lit).
  
  Sure, the list-makers have excluded short stories and nonfiction and poetry (all of which, you’d assume have the same gender imbalance), but what gives with the lack of XX authors? Equally understandable but more troublesome, perhaps, is the list’s Eurocentrism—does it have to be so white and so male? Of course, there is no comprehensive list of books about women (Flaubert, Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, and Jeffrey Eugenides are some male authors who might anchor that list). Maybe in 50 years we’ll have a different roster entirely?
  Filed under: literature, 1000 books to read before you die, women authors, the Guardian

About Dayo Olopade

• Dayo Olopade is the Washington Reporter for the Root.

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