The 10 most underrated women writers

Writer Grace Paley

1. Grace Paley (1922-2007)

American. She’s like an older sister to me. I read her audacious writing, and I think, wow, she was so intrepid! Robert Kaplan posts quotes and excerpts from writers on facebook, and that’s how I discovered her writing. Chance. She didn’t get half the recognition and awards she deserved, and is in danger of slipping into oblivion. Help! Rescue her unique work!

What to read: her short stories. All of them: they're fun and mind blowing and very much grounded in NYC.

Why she should be read: Tone. Freedom of expression. Time capsule. Originality.

French woman writer Violette Leduc

  2. Violette Leduc (1907-1972)

This French writer was mentored by Simone de Beauvoir. The latter was a good writer too, particularly her memoirs, but not underrated. De Beauvoir, and Sartre too, behaved most shabbily at times toward their intellectual competition. But de Beauvoir paid a publishing house to forward secretly Violette Leduc a monthly allowance that allowed her to write. Most elegant. Leduc’s writing was modern in its rawness and authenticity. Totally underrated.

Why she should be read: she was a groundbreaker, her work is unflinching in describing herself and others. There is no need to make allowance when you read her, as you might for mid 20^th century writer.

What to read: La Bâtarde, no doubt. This memoir tells of her origins (she was the illegitimate daughter of a maid and an aristocrat), of her love affairs with both men and women, of her life during WWII when she was a black market operator: fascinating! Raw. Authentic. Compelling.

Swedish woman writer Selma Lagerloff

3. Selma Lagerloff (1858-1940): 

I always feel bad for people who died in the early 1940s: imagine the picture of Europe they took to the grave. She was a lesbian as was Yourcenar. Marriage, and child rearing, had typically not allowed women to develop their creativity. Successful creative women in the 19^th century and 20^th century were usually not marriedL George Sand, George Eliott, the Brontës, some were even crippled like painter Schjerfbeck.

Lagerloff was the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize (hum, she was Swedish), but is now mostly overlooked.

Why she should be read: her work is of a bold, romantic streak, without any sentimentality: a treat to devour under or over the covers.

What to read: Difficult to recommend something, as she wrote in a whole range of genders. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a great book to read to children.  I loved her Löwenskold series, which is more realistic than some of her gothic or fantasy works.

  

French woman writer Marguerite Yourcenar.

4. Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)

Marguerite Yourcenar won a Nobel Prize yet she is not as read as she could be, maybe because work is often historical fiction but she eschews the traps of the genre. She is admired by a number of writers for her rich prose and for the drama of her work. 

Why: a beautiful stylist, and a great story teller.

What to read: Memoirs of Hadrian (Hadrian wrote an autobiography that has been lost, Yourcenar imagined what it might have been), Coup de Grâce (romantic novella about a dramatic triangle) is a great book gift for a woman in her twenties.

Anecdotal: She had a 40 year relationship with literary scholar Grace Frick. They lived together on an island in Maine.

5. Jamaica Kincaid: born 1949 in Antigua. Alive and kicking.

Writer Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer who is getting quite a bit of recognition. But that’s not good enough, because she is great, there is not a word that needs to be thrown away in her writing. She will only stop being underrated and scratched from this list when she gets the Nobel Prize.

Why she should be read: there is an undercurrent of passion, in the sense of Christ’s passion, in her work. Her prose is spare and powerful.

What to read: I love The Autobiography of My Mother (great title too), but Lucy is her most famous work.

6. Carson McCullers 1917-1967

Carson McCullers

She married a man also called McCullers who also wrote and drank. Then they divorced. Then they married again. Without ever having to alter her name in her documents. She lived at a time when a lot of creative people did not live long: Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Bowles (should she be included in this list?), Albert Camus. She had a funny, sweet face. Her style is supposed to be Southern Gothic. I don’t know, I think she’s just a good writer. Her characters are memorable, they touch the heart without sentimentality. She’s underrated because they don’t read her in high schools when it would be most appropriate content, I rest my case.

Why: great characters that will stay with you. Psychological insight. Depiction of Southern society.

What: Member of the Wedding. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is awesome too, written when she was 23.

Chinese American writer Pearl Buck

7. Pearl Buck (1892-1973) 

She led a fascinating life, being born the child of missionaries in China. She loved China, the Chinese people and peasantry which she described in her works. She was an activist against racism and sexism. The Good Earth was the second-best-selling novel of the 20th century, outsold only by "Gone With the Wind: the two best selling novels are works by women! The people voted!

Why she should be read: great story teller, amazing insights into China at the beginning of the 20^th century.

What to read: Any of the Chinese novels, such as The Good Earth. A great read for teenagers too. I positively loved her memoir, Fighting Angel, about her father, a tender and honest portrait of a stiff Baptist missionary with some redemptive traits. Apparently her portray of her mother, The Exile, is also very good.

Anecdotal: when she was old, she got involved with a shady character, some kind of swindler who squandered most of her fortune. A sad and grotesque endgame for a remarkable woman.

8. Elsa Morante - 1912-1985 –

Italian writer Elsa Morante

You read right, Morante not Ferrante. In my opinion the better writer. A powerhouse of a writer. It’s so inspiring to read explosive works by women who lived when the consensus was that women were weak creatures that could only decorate vases. Women such as Ferrante and Lagerloff and the Brontës, of course, paid no heed to these superstitions, thankfully for us. It should also remind us creators how important it is to go it alone, without worrying about trends and opinions.

She was quite successful during her life. Some of her works were translated into English. However, modern Italian does not always translate well into English, the tone is drastically different. She expressed reservations with some of her translations. She was married to Alberto Moravia, the legendary Roman writer, whose writings also do not translate well into English.

Why she should be read: epic, visionary writer

What to read: don’t, it’s too sad. Ok, if you must: La Storia. The story of an Italian woman and her little boy born from a rape by a German soldier. Mythic. Poignant. Unforgettable. 
The title is often not translated because it is not translatable. La Storia means both “story” and “history”:. Same in French with “histoire”.

9. Jetta Carleton - (1913-1999) - 

Jetta Carleton

Her novel The Moonflower Vine was a success when it was published. Then she didn’t write for another 30 years. Reasons are suggested, she married (not a good idea for women creators in the 20^th century!), she was busy founding a publishing house, but that did poorly. Maybe success was difficult for her to handle? It can be traumatic! Her second, and last novel, The Back Alleys of Spring, was written just before she was disabled by a stroke in the 1990s. It was eventually published posthumously in 2012.

Speaking of which, she’s quite the ghost writer, she died in 1999 but went on a tour in 2012...

Ursula K. Le Guin - 1929-2018 -

My count was 9 underrated women writers, and I could not narrow on anyone else: the Brontës got their due, George Eliott, George Sand have the fame they deserve (easier with a man’s first name, obviously), Marguerite Duras was an ace at self promotion, Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize. A bunch of writers could certainly do with more attention, but it’s not crying out loud: Doris Lessing, Patricia Highsmith (probably more highly regarded outside the US) the best crime writer ever, Françoise Sagan, Nathalie Sarraute, Astrid Lindgren, Sigrid Undset, Goliarda Sapienza, and most likely a whole beautiful array of writers from Asia and African and Latin America we wish we were reading (speak up in comments below!!).

Anyway, I asked around, and thought I would include this writer in the list who I have never read. A science fiction writer, she seems to gather suffrages around her writing, and is working in a genre that has been dominated by men. Time to give her a try.

Why: people say so.

What: The Left Hand of Darkness, according to Harold Bloom.

ሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖ

♛ After I posted about the 10 most underrated women artists, readers suggested I post about women musicians, which I felt I was not qualified to do, but am hoping someone else does. But I thought I would enjoy gathering a list of the most underrated women writers. My findings? Women writers have not been as systematically pushed out from the public eye as artists. Most intriguing!

Why? It would be very interesting to investigate this phenomenon in depth, and someone should. Right now, I would venture that there is an immediacy about books as media. No one worries about the original manuscript, the work is the words, its physical support does not matter so much. It’s a consumer good, and if it sells, it sells. The two most successful novels in the US 20^th century were written by women: Gone is the Wind, and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck (see above) Paintings need to be presented in institutions that have been run by men. Museum still show an overwhelming majority of works by white men. Art works have to be reproduced in a costly process to be spread to a larger audience. To become a good writer, writers often recommend reading extensively: that was fairly easy for educated women in the 19^th century. All a writer needs is paper, a pen and ... talent! To become a good artist, techniques need to be learned, supplies need to be accessible and affordable.

Women writers often published under men’s pen names in the 19^th century, which was not the case for women artists who did not experience that need then, or earlier, in the 17^th or 18^th century. The suppression of women artists’ work mostly happened in the 19^th century, once their painting craft became Art with a capital A and was institutionalized via museums, and the founding of art history and theory. Novels were necessary fodder for the 19^th century publications, which needed serials to hook its readership. These publications were not run by an academic establishment, they were profit making companies who didn’t care whether the content was written by a woman or a serial killer or a lemur, as long as it was successful. The 20^th century might have been relatively less egalitarian as serialization disappeared and novels became literature, flanked with literary criticism and theory. Just as painters, women writers who were successful in their lifetime have often been evinced from cultural memory: Pearl Buck, Selma Lagerloff, Jetta Carleton, Violette Leduc, etc.

♛ Two of the books, Hadrian’s Memoirs and La Storia, above are selections of the 100 best books selected by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. It’s a very interesting list though a bit biased (well, the writers doing the selecting must have felt obliged to pick each other)! 

♛ I tried to use photos of women writers at different times of their life, to give a sample of role models for aspiring writers, young and not so young.

written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

10 Women Artists That Are Vastly Underrated

Calla Lillies by O'Keefe

In the list of the 100 most expensive art work sold, the first work by a woman is in 100th place (maybe they cheated a little and dropped a few male artworks to sneak in one woman, Georgia O'Keefe, and spare our feelings). This stresses how much women's work has been suppressed and underrated. I believed for the longest time that women had created very little art work throughout the centuries, because they were discouraged to do so, did not have access to instruction nor to adequate equipment.

As I researched the project The Thread where I use the art work of women to illustrate women's condition through History, I realized that many more women created than I expected. Some were famous in their time such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Giovanna Garzoni. It was later that their work was systematically excluded from museums and art history books. I have enjoyed many wonderful, underrated artists's works. Here are some my favorite works, the ones that also should sell for hundreds of millions of dollars if any work of art should sell for that kind of money. Absent from the list are the most famous women artists whose work also should be in the 100 most expensive list, but who are not as underrated: Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Marina Abramovic. This is also a list concerned mostly with Western Art. We would need a more knowledgable art historian, and a much, much longer list for all the women creators from the rest of the world.

1. Giovanna Garzoni - Still Life. It amazes me that in the middle of the Renaissance, where the tendency was to shut women up (yes, women had more legal rights in the Middle Ages - they were not yet persecuted as witches which started in the Renaissance), the sexual innuendo in the work of Garzoni went completely unnoticed and uncensored. Artemisia Gentileschi could be pretty explicit too. See the violent birth scene disguised as Judith cutting Holoferne's head, or Mary Magdalene enjoying an orgasm thanks to her skulled lover. Giovanna Garzoni was called Chaste Garzoni during her lifetime, but in my opinion, she was familiar with a man's aroused private parts as evidenced by the beans above, gently swollen with life: life that is, life that might be. Neither vertically erect nor martial, it's a very different image from the aggressive phallus men artists have favored. Her open figs and melons are quite juicy too.

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Transgressions, Nalini Malani

2. Nalini Malani: (B 1946) - Remembering Mad Meg. There are many contemporary women artists who deserve a larger spot in the limelight, and that includes Malani who is bigger than life.  Her work is big, her referential is big, her soul is huge. Consequently, the work she produces, bewitching, is an enchantment. Malani has addressed the feminine condition extensively, but not exclusively. This is what she has to say about her piece: 'Mad Meg was a character in a Breugel painting, which is in Antwerp now. It’s not a very large painting; it’s about 75 centimeters high by about a meter wide. You see this figure, this woman who almost looks like an androgynous figure striding across a landscape of completely perverted things around her, for example, there is an egg-like humanoid eating through his anus. It’s almost like she is seeing all of this and somehow wants to put things right but then she is considered the deviant.' I find it very touching that she goes and salvages a female character from a European Renaissance painting.

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3. Sofonisba Anguissola: Her work is outstanding, it's difficult to choose one piece. She made stunningly beautiful portraits of women. In fact, she often explores the relationship between men and women, the female condition: a girl looks at her reading brother with an ambiguous expression: resentment? In Portrait of the Artist's Family, featured, her sister Minerva looks at the bond between her brother and her father, who seems only interested in the boy, and turns his back to her. The dog is the only one looking at the artist, asking her to bear witness to the injustice.
Anguissola is finely getting her due, with Lavinia Fontana, with an exhibition at the Prado in Madrid.

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4. Berthe Morisot might be considered famous enough to be excluded from this list. However, quite famous is not good enough. She should be the star because her work is amongst the very best there is: bold, gutsy not too say ballsy, big, passionate, sensual, daring, there is nothing "feminine" about it but her attachment to representing women, girls, and often mothers and daughters. She painted extensively her daughter Julie who was born from her marriage to Manet's younger brother Eugène. She merged impressionism and expressionism in work that is unrivaled in its exuberance.

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5. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an African American sculptor who studied at RISD and spent 12 years in Paris when that city was attracting African American luminaries where she nearly died of hunger, literally, while sculpting. She might be the most underrated of the women in this list. She was talented, expressive, brilliant, but her work got her very little recognition, and still to this day is acknowledged by a handful of art historians or African American scholars. She exhibited during her mid career, the Whitney purchased the Congolaise above, a piece of utmost delicateness and elegance, and she taught art. But later, her career petered out, and she ended up working as a maid. Makes me mad.

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6. Helen Schjerfbeck: An honest self portrait by painter Helen Schjerfbeck, prolific despite suffering from bad health. She could be a bit scattered, she tried all sorts of styles, and was very adventurous in her experiments. She had an original and reflective approach to womanhood. She was Finnish, at a time when a number of talented, inventive women painters worked: Elin Danielson-Gambogi and Ellen Thesleff. She is also to enjoy, finally, a large retrospective at the Royal Academy in London.

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7. Paula Modersohn-Becker: Selfportrait at 6th Wedding Anniversary is a paradoxical painting: she had left her husband to commit to her art, and was not, at least physically, pregnant. She eventually went back to her husband, and died following the birth of their daughter. Her last word is supposed to have been: "Shade". Shame. Yes, what a shame for her, for all of us. She would have been one of the major painters of the 20th Century. During her short life, she was prolific: her work, clearly inspired by Gauguin, incorporated Northern European naive styles. She also tended to frame her subjects very closely, giving them a mythic presence. I miss her deeply.

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8. Belkis Ayon: I'm at a loss to discuss her work, either it would take pages and pages of thinking and analyzing and scrutinizing, or there is only need to look at the work. But here are words that seem apt: extremely mystical, extremely original, extremely beautiful, extremely inventive. She was Cuban and died way too young in mysterious circumstances, as did Ana Mendieta who could be included in this list too. Both are supposed to have committed suicide, and both might have been murdered. 

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9. Leonor Fini, Leonor Carrington, Remedios Varos: that's three, but it was too difficult to choose amongst these superlative surrealists. This print was produced to promote a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Met in NYC. I prefer to call it "Two Women". It can be looked at as the epitome of dualism. Is it one woman or two? One sees, the other dreams. One comes out at the viewer, the other one invites the viewer into her self. Only their faces are quite distinct, their bodies might be merged even if the indication of a shoulder seems to locate the closed eyed in front, the open eyed protecting from behind. The technique, so skilled when we consider Fini was never formally trained, brings to mind Michelangelo, and creates an impression of translucence, as if we are looking at spirits.

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10. Marie-Gabrielle Capet  had to be in this list with this vibrant self portrait painted at the age of 22. How confident and bold she looks. Later, she seems more demure, alas, maybe she got the message that confidence was an unseemly attitude for a woman. She was a devoted student of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, also underrated, who taught other women (see her self portrait with two students including Marie-Gabrielle). Their studio must have been a lot of fun, and tender and warm too.

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The suppression of these women's work is unfair to the artists who were actually often more prominent in their life time then now. The institutionalization of art, through the creation of museums and art schools, the institution of art history, has been most prejudicial to women, and other minorities. In the Renaissance, when they wanted a good portrait, patrons did not mind so much the gender of the craft person as long as the painter had talent and could make a good likeness. But when it came to immortality, women were eliminated from memory. 

The suppression of these works has also been unfair to the public, particularly women. Many of these artists depicted their peer, not as objects but as subjects. They presented an interpretation of what it means to be a woman. Women have been deprived of this legacy, of this interpretative mirror of themselves while they have been assailed by images of women reduced to sexually available bodies, or to sexless saints.

Finally....  Most of art works by women artists are anonymous: sacred texts illuminations by nuns, embroideries, the magnificent tapestries from the Renaissance, quilts, pottery, dolls, not to mention the many women who worked in their father or brother or husband's workshop, unnamed and unrecognized. And now, the latest findings posit that even the Lascaux cave paintings were created by prehistoric women, and did they have talent!

written and published by  - -  Arabella Hutter von Arx

The Thread: A Prologue

Below is the prologue to a project part memoir, part historical fiction, The Thread: 

Inspired by Helen Schjerfbeck

Inspired by Remedios Varos

We were the only family that ate corn on the cob and celebrated Christmas on the 25^th of December instead of the 24^th. We didn’t know the simple explanation to these peculiarities: our mother was American. One day, long before she came to Switzerland, she had taken a machete and cut her life in two. Did she open this gash over one day? A month ? A year ? My father, who met her when she was 20, knew little more than we did. She had already changed her name, did not see any of her family nor any childhood friend. She did not write to them, did not speak to them, did not discuss. Thus we knew her, born at twenty, all questions about her past taboo. This code of silence existed before I, the youngest of the family, started asking questions. Even friends of my parents seemed to be aware of the taboo and respected it.

“She must come from Britain because she speaks English and often travels alone to London. “ we whispered during one of our secret conferences. She sent us beautiful postcards from the British Museum, with sweet words that failed to touch us as her absence seemed further proof of her aloofness.

“She must have lived near the sea, as she talked about picnics at the beach. “ Reported my sister. “She mentioned a nanny. “I added. “ She didn’t. “ “ Yes, she did. “ I imagined a large Victorian house, a bit run down, near windswept dunes covered with brambles. And behind the shutters of the villa, the great secret, the deep mystery that was hidden from our sight. If she made any allusion to the past, we would freeze and pretend casualness, in the hope that, oblivious to our presence, she would inadvertently slip into confidences.

The day of the revelation, we sat at regular intervals around my mother, hearts pounding. The living room looked reticent now that I didn’t live home anymore. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know, I was frightened. She started speaking, without much preamble.

‘I went to the embassy in Geneva to look up my last name in the phone book. I found my brother’s phone number. When I called a man answered. I didn’t know who he was.

“I’d like to speak to Vincent.”

“He’s not here. Who’s calling?”

 “His sister. Who are you?”

“His father.”

A childhood can not be restored in one or two hours. This narrative of her past would normally have been built over time by what our childhood terribly missed: by hearing touching and humorous anecdotes, stories from the grandmother we never met, looking at family photographs together, visiting relatives. We asked a few questions, as if stroking cautiously an unpredictable cat. She answered, describing the harrowing events that led her to cut all ties with her family in a manner as devoid of emotion as a notary reading one more will.

Inspired by Ana Mendieta

The burden of suffering which my mother had shed became mine. I filled not just with my mother’s pain, but her mother’s as well, and that of all her little brothers and sisters’, rippling down the generations. The only way to drain the overflowing vault was through the valve of my imagination. I began to make up the missing episodes in my mother’s life, and in her mother’s. Then I went back to my great-grandmother, the famous Lietta, who seemed the source of all our calamities. This emotional monster, what could she have gone through in her childhood? I had no reason to stop, and beyond this cruel grandmother, I went to listen to the story of each woman who miraculously gave birth to a girl who then in turn became a mother, a long meandering thread over the centuries, saved against all odds from being cut down by nature and men. I followed it back to the time when a handful of thinkers on their peninsula decided the important facts to remember would not be desires, births, jealousy, vanity, rape. Instead they came up with a discipline that would only record political events, thus excluding women’s memory: History was born.

To read the first story of 100 women talk to their daughters over 2500 years, click here.

All illustrations original works by Arabella Hutter, as are the texts.