Recommend Groundbreaking Women Writers

The history of literature is full of groundbreaking women—authors who go where no one has trod before, whose pens carve grooves in which later generations can only aspire to follow. Women have always written. Sometimes they have done so under pseudonyms. Sometimes they have not been published or preserved (and very often they also have); they have surely been underrated, but they have always written. And many women writers have kicked ass so hard that they have left the world of literature irreparably changed behind them. We’d like to hear your recommendations of women writers who have literally set the standards for authors who follow them—whether they were the first to write in a certain field, or inventors of a new genre, or just someone you can’t imagine the world of literature without, leave a comment below telling us about her and why she was so great.

To kick off, we’ve asked a few authors, editors, reviewers, and other friends for their suggestions. Read and enjoy.

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Omi Wilde (story; story)

I was a poetry-enraptured kid when I first learned about Enheduanna, first author known by name to history, but I’m still in childish awe at the way her words echo across 4300 years to reach me. As a princess and a priestess in what we now know as Iraq, she was powerful religiously and politically. Her poetry wove together two religions, creating a new pantheon from among the gods of the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples. As the daughter of an Akkadian ruler and a Sumerian priestess she embodied the unification of the two cultures that she strove towards and her work ensured the stability of her father’s empire. In this, we might consider her to have been the first propagandist as well, but long after the rise and fall of empires it is her poetry and her impact on the form that has endured. “They approach the light of day, about me, / the light is obscured / The shadows approach the light of day, / it is covered with a (sand) storm.”

Further reading: Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poetry of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (UTP 2001) by Betty De Shong Meador.

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Cait Coker (TFF Reviews)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623-1673) was a British aristocrat, philosopher, scientist, playwright, proto-feminist, and one of the earliest science fiction authors. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London, and she published The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World in 1666. Usually shortened to just The Blazing World, the book tells the story of a young Lady who discovers a utopian society of talking animals in a parallel world, possibly making it the first example of portal fiction. Becoming Empress there, the girl decides to invade the imperfect real world and remake it in a utopian image; the novel is therefore a fictional counterpart to Cavendish’s political treatise Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, also published in 1666. Though she published a dozen works during her lifetime, she was often dismissed and satirized as “Mad Madge,” especially in misogynist plays satirizing popular women writers. Cavendish’s reputation was largely erased and languished until Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about her in The Common Reader, which started to recover her reputation as an early professional writer. In the decades since, Cavendish has had a scholarly revival in the field of women’s writing, if not in popular science fiction.

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Alessandra Cristallini (blog)

In 1816, a nineteen year old girl created science fiction. She is Mary Shelley, and she is my literature heroine. Frankenstein may be regarded as horror in popular culture but if you read it you will discover a novel that has very little of the “evil scientist mad with ambition and hunted by torches and pitchforks in some creepy castle, preferably in the Carpathians” trope. No. At its heart, Frankenstein is a cautionary tale, and not a hopeless one: this is where Mary Shelley’s greatness emerges. Just like modern sci-fi authors she was inspired by the most debated scientific discoveries of the time, with all the mistakes, hopes and dreams that came with them. She saw how science and technology were making lives better, but in a costly way for the people and the environment. She didn’t write an anti-technology story but rather a tale about how progress should be kept in check carefully before we destroy ourselves—and humanity with it. She saw the importance of modern science and realized how life-changing it was going to be. And that's how science fiction was born.

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Maria Grech Ganado (profile; interview)

As was common in Victorian England, Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights (1847) under the male pen-name of Ellis Bell. Initially the uninhibited “savagery” at the Heights, as opposed to the orderly calm of the Grange (a merging of Gothic style with that of Jane Austen), shocked its critics. Today, the novel is regarded globally as one of the best ever written. First assessed as chaotic, the novel's two parts are seen now to constitute a cogent, dialectically balanced structure, influenced, perhaps, by translations of German rather than French literature after the Napoleonic wars.

Philosophical, social and even political studies of the novel’s theme argue that it goes far beyond the intensity of the Heathcliff/Catherine relationship, despite this being the nub of the plot. Catherine/Cathy’s pivotal name returns to “Earnshaw” after going twice through “Linton,” whereas “Heathcliff” dies out completely. It is the only name which “earns” the union of the Heights and the Grange. Patterns of natural attributes, both elemental and animal, also become symbolic (e.g. storm/wolf vs calm/sucking leveret), major relationships reflect elective affinities, prose is rendered poetical and one is bound to discover something new every time Wuthering Heights is reread.

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Clare McKeown (@ClareMQN)

Although it’s a feminist classic, I only recently read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” for the first time. Gilman published the short story in 1892 after her experience of being subjected to an extreme “rest cure” for a severe mental health crisis, most likely post-partum depression or psychosis. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a first-person tale of Gothic horror, and in it, she broke ground by daring to challenge the dominant narrative that “hysterical” women needed to be controlled by men who knew what was best for them.

Gilman, like many of the early feminists, was decidedly not intersectional. As Lindy West points out, one of Gilman’s later works in particular, the feminist utopian novel, Herland, is “rife with gender essentialism, white supremacy and anti-abortion rhetoric.” However, West holds, as I do, that we can learn by engaging with the work of early feminist thinkers, even when we must acknowledge where they fall short.

Gilman broke ground by asserting that women are capable of knowing our own minds and our own selves, and responsible health practitioners need to listen to and respect women. Unfortunately, women today still struggle to have our physical, emotional, and psychological pain taken seriously by medical professionals. Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 2018 reminded me of how far we have come, and how far we still need to go.

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Lisa Timpf (Goodreads; TFF reviews)

During her 70-year writing career, Andre Norton penned well over 100 novels as well as several short stories, and edited and compiled a number of anthologies. And yet, many of her readers may have been unaware they were reading a book written by a woman. The ambiguity was intentional, and a function of society’s expectations at the time Norton launched her career. In 1934, Norton published The Prince Commands, a work of historical fiction. Fearing that the then mostly-male audience for juvenile fiction might be hesitant to pick up a book written by “Alice Mary Norton,” she changed her legal name to Andre Alice Norton. Most of her works were published under the name Andre Norton, although she also used the pseudonyms Andrew North and Allen Weston.

After focussing mainly on historical fiction early in her career, Norton branched out into science fiction, exploring themes such as time travel, humankind's first voyages to other planets, telepathic communication between humans and animals, and quests for artifacts related to “Forerunner” species. She also wrote a number of fantasy novels, including the Witch World series.

Norton is credited with helping to pave the way for female science fiction and fantasy writers who followed her, by showing that a woman could write such works, and do it successfully. Her vivid and imaginative settings, the universality of her themes, and her ability to tell and pace a good story made her popular with generations readers, some of whom became writers in their own right. Norton’s legacy lives on in the form of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, which recognizes outstanding works of science fiction or fantasy geared toward the young adult market.

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Regina de Búrca (twitter; TFF)

I will be eternally grateful to Ursula K. Le Guin’s pioneering writing for changing the way I think. From the ethnically diverse society in her Earthsea novels, the environmental decline in The New Atlantis to the genderless world of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin tackled the deep inequality, shortsightedness and greed of our world by creating and exploring others. Her work fearlessly faced issues of gender, sexuality, race and the environment among other topics, advocating justice and independent thought. She questioned widely-accepted notions about sexuality and gender from a critical perspective and never backed down from speaking her truth or standing up for what she believed in. Her prolific work subverted literary genres and conventions while blazing a trail for other women writers. Earlier this year we lost a true visionary when sadly, she passed away, but her groundbreaking legacy lives on, continuing to lead the way.

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Now leave a comment and tell us of your favorite groundbreaking women authors—who changed the world of literature so much that you can’t imaging reading, or writing, if she hadn’t existed?

Recommend: women in noir/crime

Noir is a genre of fiction too often plagued with sexist stereotypes. If you are tired of plots where women characters are either manipulative femmes fatales or naive girls in need of protection, and you would like to read a good crime story without rolling your eyes every other page… maybe this month’s recommendations can be of some help! TFF authors, editors and reviewers have shared quite different examples: from more traditional noir to contamination with other genres; from novels to comics; from the darkest stories for adult readers to humorous YA series. Feel free to join us in compiling this list, adding in the comments all the noir stories with women and/or by women that you have read and enjoyed! Mainstream or obscure, we want them all!

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Petra Kuppers (website)

My choice of noir is Gail Simone’s graphic novel with illustrators Jon Davis-Hunt and Quinton Winter, Clean Room: Immaculate Conception (DC Comics, 2016). It’s got all the ingredients of a good noir: a besieged and heart-wounded hero (journalist Chloe Pierce), a scintillating set of beautifully realized locations (scenes are set in Germany, Norway, various points in the US), and an equally wounded and enigmatic femme fatale (Astrid Mueller, head of a cult-like organization). Members of Astrid’s organization visit the clean room, where they face their fears. They might end up killing themselves, as Chloe’s fiancee did, or, later in the story, a Hollywood action hero. Add to that mix intriguing monsters, skin gore, torture and self-mutilation, lots of nudity and sex, and more twists and turns than one can shake a stick at. The psychological tension runs high and makes this a brilliant read, with two powerful women leads, one black, one white, none of whom need rescuing, although both have an intriguing bunch of henchpeople (including a group in Chloe’s camp that reminds me of Mulder’s nerds in the X Files). Queer narratives complicate the story, releasing us from scenarios where there is only ever one ‘other.’

Valeria Vitale (TFF, blog)

The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith is a story that shows all the landmarks of the noir genre: a hardened former police officer, a corrupt aristocracy that flirts with criminal organisations, shady middlemen that love money too much, a fascinating client that are bound to bring troubles, and a city, Atlanta, that is, as in many noir, a crucial component of the plot. At the same time, Griffith’s novel eludes easy categorizations and keeps surprising the reader, choosing unexpected turns, changing pace and focus. What makes this story so interesting to me is not (only) that most of the main characters are women, but that this scenario is not treated as something exceptional: the novel unravels smoothly without anyone being disconcerted by the fact that, yes, women can be dark and dangerous too and, yes, they also make very good detectives.

The Blue Place portrays a number of relationships between women that are beautifully diverse and complex, and feed the plot without falling into stereotypes or being used as simple triggers: flirt and courtship, romantic involvement, friendship, solidarity, family bonds. They all feel real and profoundly human and make this story exceptionally engaging.

Cait Coker (TFF)

Jacqueline Carey's novels Santa Olivia (2009) and Saints Astray (2011) are unlikely to be read as noir, but I would argue that they are closer to that genre than to conventional dystopia, as noir is characterized through its ethical ambiguity and fatalism, and dystopia through omnipresent degradation. In Carey's world, there is a valid escape to be had from the shitty not-too-distant future southwest US, where a queer Hispanic teen named Loup is torn between revenge for her dead brother and escaping to a better life for herself and her girlfriend Pilar. The outer world, including Mexico and Europe, has rebounded after a devastating pandemic in a way that the isolationist US has not. Loup's and Pilar's journey evolves beyond a quest for survival to one of discovery of this outside world, from tourist beaches to fashion and pop music.

Their saga concludes with their search for social justice for their home, still under martial law, and for equal rights for genetically modified humans, both of which are impeded by the complex oligarchy of the US government and military, as in this case being born, for Loup, is a crime of itself.

Jessica Campbell (web page)

Robin Stevens’s ongoing book series Murder Most Unladylike is one of those things that’s tailor-made for those of us who like the aesthetics of classic English fiction but also like progressive politics (see also Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries). The books, intended for children and teens but very readable for adults, feature Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells, budding detectives at a girls’ boarding school in 1930s England. Daisy comes from the British gentry, while Hazel is from Hong Kong; they become friends and form their own detective society. The mysteries are interesting, and they frequently evoke the likes of Agatha Christie with titles like Arsenic for Tea and settings like a manor house and the Orient Express. Hazel’s first-person narration subtly invites readers into her experience as an Asian girl in a very Caucasian society. Then there’s her experience as a smart but quiet person who has to learn to assert herself with the brash Daisy. These are good things for kids to read about, and Stevens’s prose is never didactic. I was encouraged to read these books by a friend and her middle-school-aged son – and I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint which of them encouraged them more strongly!

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Please let us know in the comments your favorite women in noir and crime—you'll be adding to my reading list!

Interview with Ada Palmer

Interview by Cait Coker.

Ada Palmer is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her first science fiction novel, Too Like the Lightning, was released in June, and describes the future of humanity in the Twenty-Fifth Century in terms that are as familiar and foreign as the period of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment is to us.

Cait: I find it fascinating that you’re a historian by day and science-fiction author by night (and more day). You clearly drew upon a deep knowledge of the politics and philosophy of the Enlightenment in writing your book. Can you tell me what first made the connections between past and future for you in writing Too Like the Lightning?

Ada: If you think about it, there’s nothing more similar to the future than the past: both are long blocks of time during which human societies change and evolve, and are affected by crises and gradual transformations. I think being a historian is immensely useful for SF because it gives me a world of examples and test cases to compare to when I want to answer questions about things that might change a society, “What if the transportation system suddenly got faster?” (Look at the spread of railroads). “What if the dominantly-English origins of the internet mean that English comes to be a sort of universal second language?” (Look at Greek in the Roman Empire). “How will space colonies separate culturally from Earth?” (Figure out the travel time, then look at Earth’s many past diasporas and migrations.) In Too Like the Lightning I wanted to imagine Earth’s future in a few hundred years, and it seemed natural to answer my questions by looking at the past and using it for comparison.

I’m going to geek out for a minute: Your knowledge of the period really materializes itself in the book as object, and how it relies on typography and the use of graphs as part of the story. In SFF we talk a lot about how genre texts have influenced scientific and technological developments, but this was history influencing a genre text. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

I love the double-take people often do opening the cover, with its illustration of flying cars and its super-modernist sans serif font, to find that period title page with 18th century fonts, woodblock ornaments, and even 18th century censorship permissions on the front. When the book was in its last stages I sent an eleven page letter to the typography team talking about different eighteenth-century period book layout things I hoped they’d do, and special things I was doing with punctuation, and such. I was overjoyed when I saw how much they’d done with the final version, period-feeling fonts, the little wood block type ornaments on the title page and in the headers. I wanted those small touches because the book intentionally puts the reader in a strange position in terms of time. The narrator is writing a history of the 25th century, so the narrator expects a reader from his future, with sensibilities advanced beyond his own day, “enlightened” compared to the 25th century. But the real reader is from the 21st century, so when the narrator does things like explain how “he” and “she” work because the narrator expects they’ve dropped out of use like “thee” and “thou,” suddenly the real 21st century reader has to wrestle with three time periods at once, the 21st century, the 25th century, and the narrator’s imagined future past the 25th century. Except the narrator is also trying to write in an 18th century style (trying with middling success, as we try with middling success to act like Renaissance people at a Renn Fest), so a fourth moment in time is also involved. In effect, there is no point at time at which this book would be at home, it’s an object out of time, written in the future in the style of the past for an imagined farther future which may or may not ever come to be. People have found the layering of all those time periods delightfully mind-bending, and effective at raising questions about how the future will view the past. So by having period typography the book physically reminds you of its object-out-of-time-ness, making the reading experience more immersive, though the immersion isn’t in the world of 2454, it’s in the book object itself as an object self-consciously out of time. And 18th century fonts are really beautiful. Have you seen the capital Q in the page header of the chapter “The Interlude in Martin Guildbreaker Pursues the Question...”? Most beautiful Q in the world!

What attracted you to speculative fiction in the first place?

I’ve loved F&SF since I was tiny. I remember when it started: one of my oldest memories was going to the public library, and going to the kids’ section as usual to look for a new Doctor Seuss book, and someone had misshelved a big hardcover copy of The Hobbit there, with a *huge* red dragon on the cover. It was one of the heaviest things I’d ever lifted, but I asked Dad if he would read it to me, and we checked it out (though he already had two copies at home, but explaining that books have multiple editions is a little advanced for the One Fish, Two Fish, Red Dragon, Two Towers phase of reading.) I made up stories as a kid, started writing them down in elementary school, and kept it up. So it’s my natural genre, the one I grew up with, the one in which my ideas naturally manifest.

And history?

History was a later fascination. I enjoyed all kinds of documentaries as a kid, and expected to go into science since I was great in all my science classes. But when I started at Simon’s Rock College we had a required Great Books reading course. I remember reading in Civilization and its Discontents about Freud’s “Death instinct” and I remembered about a documentary I had watched about WWI, and it felt to me like Freud wouldn’t have had that idea before the war. So I went to the library to his complete works and looked through pre-war pieces and found places where certainly would have mentioned it if he’d had that concept but it wasn’t there. It was the first time I realized that historical events shape ideas, that even the greatest philosophical concepts don’t come from the raw stuff of people’s heads but come into being because people live through changes in the real world. I became fascinated by the history of ideas, how the range of concepts available to us expands over time, and how one era’s heresy might be another era’s truism. If every other subject involves studying what we think is true, then the history of ideas is studying why we think those things are true, how our culture decided on those ideas and not others, when they started, and what other things we might have believed had we been born at different points in time and space.

We often ask how has geography (including place, culture, economics) influences an author’s work. In this case your books, fiction and nonfiction (Lucretius in the Renaissance) have drawn heavily from Renaissance and Enlightenment Italy. What fascinates you the most about that place and time?

Most of the overt historical references in the book are French Enlightenment—Voltaire, Diderot, de Sade, the looming specter of Thomas Hobbes—but the Renaissance comes into it, not in the references, but in the relationship of this world to its past. One important part of every culture is how it describes, chops up, and values its own past. What past eras were there? Which were good or bad? These ideas aren’t defaults, they change over time. In the 1430s the Florentine Leonardo Bruni invented the “Dark Ages” and suddenly history had three parts (ancient (good), dark ages (bad), “modern” i.e. Renaissance (trying to be good again)), whereas before that it had two (before Christ (bad), after Christ (good)), and before that in antiquity, the Greeks and Romans’ imagined history had three or four parts (golden age, silver age, bronze age, iron age). Ours has different parts too, and we idealize some and criticize others. The world I designed in 2454 has a very similar relationship to its past to what the Renaissance had, which is to say that, like the Renaissance, 2454 is having a big revival of the ideas of an earlier era (in its case Enlightenment; in the Renaissance’s case antiquity), and that revival is causing big cultural and political transformations. In both cases it’s not the first revival of such things (antiquity had an earlier revival in the Carolingian period, and my imagined future had a small Enlightenment revival in the 22nd century but is having a bigger one in the 25th). It’s a different kind of cause of change than I think most SF authors think about. When depicting a science fictional world having an upheaval, we usually think of a technological cause (sudden light speed travel! cloning! immortality serum!), or a circumstantial one (out of fuel! overcrowded! incoming asteroid!), or a big discovery (new planet! new aliens!). But big uphevals can also be caused by purely cultural changes, in the case of the Renaissance the impulse to revive antiquity, which was a response to a bunch of other changes but itself became the big transformer. Studying that gave me the idea that the transformation of my 25th century could have a similarly cultural root.

Do you think writing for an audience of historians is different than for an audience of SFF readers?

It’s the reading mode that is different, more than the people. Many academics read and enjoy SFF, including myself, but we read a history in different ways from how we read a science fiction novel. F&SF readers in particular have a certain way of learning about an unfamiliar setting, which is different from how we do it in a history. Histories—both academic histories and popular histories—explain their subjects and settings directly; when a new unfamiliar thing is introduced it’s explained and connected to other things, systematically. A well-crafted history will introduce many new facts and details, planning the order of them carefully so they all fit together, each connecting to the next in order, because connections form long-term arguments, and connections also help us remember things. Reading genre fiction (including historical fiction) we learn new world details a different way. We expect that there will be small references to unfamiliar elements peppering the book constantly, and we know to collect these like puzzle pieces, setting them aside in our memory, trusting that the author will make them fit together later to form a more complete picture. SFF readers do it naturally, but it’s genuinely a learned skill, and very intelligent readers with no experience of genre fiction reading sometimes struggle with SFF because they come to the first unfamiliar thing and stop, puzzling it over, trying to figure it out at that moment, expecting it to be explained at the time, and that if it doesn’t make sense yet they must have missed something. If puzzling and rereading doesn’t solve it, such a reader usually moves on, forgetting the detail, because there’s nothing to connect it to, so it’s hard to remember. In a sense, history means giving the puzzle pieces in order, each followed by the ones it connects to, so they gradually, logically reveal an image; genre fiction means giving the reader scattered puzzle pieces that don’t connect, so fragments of a mysterious image form until it’s partly visible, and the reader is excited by the hints and clues offered by the partial glimpses, and the process of trying to guess what the big picture is before the last pieces are revealed.

The other thing that really struck me about Too Like the Lightning was how it felt like a manga or anime as it would have been produced in the Eighteenth Century. It was incredibly vivid and visual, and I know you’re a fan of those forms as well. Can you tell me how you think genre and format influence each other?

Interesting question. It’s possible that my ways of pacing how I describe facial expressions between dialog is influenced by the pacing of conversation and expression work in anime, though if so I’m not conscious of it; my styles of visual description in the books are consciously based on the way Robert Fagles renders Homer, and the way Arthur Conan Doyle in the Holmes short stories uses descriptions of architecture and atmosphere to control the pacing of revelation in a dialog scene. I would say the main influence that anime and manga have had on Terra Ignota is that, unlike a lot of SF authors, I’m responding to Japanese conversations about science fiction in addition to Anglophone ones. Throughout the 20th century American SF was translated into Japanese, and Japan has had a lot of authors, many working in anime/manga media, who have responded to classic SF concepts and developed them in different ways from how they were developed in the US and UK. To give one example, while US & UK SF authors have been having a conversation about AIs and robotics, and developed certain conventions, default expected developments, and big questions that we’re all familiar with, like Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, but over the same years Japan has had its own conversation about robots, AIs, robot laws and ethics, responding to Western ones but contributing lots of new original ideas. I talk about SF as a conversation, and when the golden age proposed ideas, Japan responded. Recent readers of The Three Body Problem have had a taste of a similar phenomenon, seeing how a Chinese author who read classic Western SF responded, but from a different direction, contributing excitingly different new ideas. Because anime and manga are easy to find in English and French, Japan is one of the easiest other science fiction traditions to access, and I really enjoy great works of Japanese SF, like Phoenix, Pluto, They Were 11, or Gunbuster, not because they’re in anime/manga form, but because they’re full of fascinating and original SF ideas and questions. A lot of Western SF authors and readers haven’t accessed what Japan has been doing, so sometimes I’ll see an American SF work that’s dealing with robots and think to myself, “Wow, this author clearly doesn’t know what Japan has done with this concept, but I sure wish he did because his response would be awesome!” Thus Too Like the Lightning isn’t consciously responding anime/manga as media, but it is consciously responding to some of the big SF questions that Japan has explored using those media.

And finally, a very serious question to close: Do you write with a lucky pen or pencil?

No. After so much typing, my wrists are in such bad shape that writing by hand is very challenging, though physical therapy is helping me make great strides. But I do have a favorite pencil—it was a present from my Dad, and is black with a little Greek helmet on the eraser end, and a quotation of one of my favorite lines from the Iliad (Fagles translation of course!): “The God of War is impartial, he hands out death to the man who hands out death.”

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Ada Palmer’s next book in the Terra Ignota sequence, Seven Surrenders, will be released in February 2017.