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?

Guest post: Decolonizing the Utopian Imperative

For this post, I’m wishing everyone thinking about utopia, imperialism or decolonization would just go read Ursula K. Le Guin’s esaay, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” You should go read that and come back.

Still here?

In this musing on the pitfalls of imperialism and its ideological conflation with utopia, Le Guin brilliantly brings together utopian thinking from Robert Elliot and Milan Kundera, notions about communitas via Victor Turner, social theory from Levi-Strauss, philosophy from Chuang Tzu along with some thoughts about the yin/yang of rationalism as opposed to the soft, the social and the unruly, the way of the Trickster. I can’t hope to summarize it here. 

But here’s what the essay inspires me to think about:

On the construct of the New World: as Le Guin says, “Only if a European discovered or invented it could America exist.”

Colonization, not only in the United States but all over the world, is/was based on economics, exploitation of people and resources, but in some sense, it’s also based on ideas. Big ideas like Democracy, Salvation, Order and Capitalism and their alleged superiority to existent social systems and relationships to the environment. Utopian ideas.

Results: subjugation, assimilation and disappearance of cultures, along with appropriation, tokenization and exoticism.

The West is still creating stories about the primitive and the unknown through history and literature: one pretends to tell the objective stories of the world, which ones are worth knowing and how to think about Progress and Civilization, and the other shapes our thinking about people, places and how to think about the Other. Maybe they both do (that landscape is changing, but there’s still a great deal of work to do).

Have you noticed yet what’s missing from my post/rant? Where are the perspectives from the “outside”? Where are the counter-narratives?

If you didn’t read Le Guin’s essay, go read it. While you’re at it, read Cornel West. Read Uma Narayan. Read Chela Sandoval. Read Arundhati Roy, anything by her at all, who said, “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent,” and “Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.”

Support the creation of new narratives, like We See a Different Frontier. Suggest resources for counter-narrative in the comments below.

Write your own counter-narrative.

Feminist Utopias: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?

In January, I posted to this blog on the subject of utopia, a perfect place. Is such a society possible?

Do certain conditions, such as the absence of crime, poverty, racism and other inequities make for the perfect place? Utopian narrative is a place to explore these questions, but these same narratives could be termed dystopian. Who decides what conditions are the most important, and how can these conditions be established and maintained without creating new modes of oppression?

One way to approach the inherent teetering between utopia/dystopia is to acknowledge and use that tipping point as a point of departure. In feminist utopian literature, narratives often complicate the easy answer, avoid closure, or look to examine multiple perspectives but provide no simple solution.

I hope I don’t have to explain or defend “feminist” here, but I welcome relevant dialogue.

Let’s just say by way of definition that feminist utopias are concerned with the search for equality in the ideal community. They consider both the existence of social stratification based on difference (sex, race, race, class) and the humanist ideal of sameness to be problematic. Gender inequalities are part of the exploration but not the totality. Feminist fiction tends to project its desires for perfect community and to investigate problematic elements of those desires. As such, some may seem neither utopian nor dystopian per se.

Three perfect examples are Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (she even subtitles it “An Ambiguous Utopia”), Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These works look at social inequalities and suggest structures or processes to enable more equitable ways of living, but they’re not easy.

In The Dispossessed, the protagonist Shevek is forced to travel from his anarchist/socialist world to a repressive capitalist one to share scientific ideas which are deemed disruptive and self-serving to the functioning of his community. In The Fifth Sacred Thing, factions within a radically democratic city disagree about how to peacefully resist attack from militaristic invaders. Piercy’s novel presents an alternate society that may or may not be the hallucination of a mentally ill narrator.

Compare these narratives to utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which projects a desire for the perfect human community or dystopias like Orwell’s 1984 which predict extreme, dim futures as cautionary tales. Their approach is humanist, focused on repression of citizenry, not issues specific to women's social roles and intersections of identity.

What are your thoughts on these intersections, and what other texts explore this?

What's useful about this kind of literary exploration?

“I Never Did Like Smart-Ass Utopians”

guest post by Tracie Welser

Part 1 of 3 guest posts on Utopian Narrative


Utopia is an obsession of mine. I find literature that explores notions of a perfect place very appealing. People living peacefully and work together in harmony, who wouldn’t want to live in a place like that? Who wouldn’t want to read about that?

Apparently, lots of people. It’s a “no-place,” they say. Or “it could never work, it always fails in the real world, so why bother with it?” For some (and I’m basing this on discussions I’ve had), talk of egalitarian society causes a sort of anxiety about political correctness, or liberal guilt, or anger/concerns about the evils of Socialism.

As Pandora says to her niece in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, “I never did like smart-ass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring.”

The first big question seems to be, what constitutes the “perfect place,” and for whom? Is it a beautiful, unspoiled place very far from anywhere else, where perfectible dreams are possible? To Thomas More, credited with coining the word “utopia” in the 16th century, the perfect place meant a land with no unemployment, no overpopulation, no religious bigotry, and the elimination of private property (although, oddly enough, slavery was okay).

The dream of a perfect place depends on where you’re standing, the historical or cultural moment from which the dream arises. That perfect place may exist in a possible future, or in a place, or even in a past “Golden Age.”

In the U.S., the utopian ideal could be considered a founding principle of the nation and the driving force behind colonialism and westward expansion. The New World was New Eden, a collective fantasy, a dream of a better world. Never mind that the land was already occupied.

In fiction, these worlds exist as thought experiments. Narratives encourage the reader to reflect on social problems and possibly even solutions. Speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy have a way of doing that.

Utopia, then, is dreaming, yearning, for something that doesn’t quite exist and never exactly will. But is it problematic that these worlds don’t, won’t or can’t exist?

Fast-forward to modern ideas of the perfect place. Let’s dream a little bit.

What would your ideal society look like, your perfect place?

How about a society where equality is the norm for people of all races and genders and ableness of body, where inequity and violence have been eliminated?

What problems or tensions do you foresee?



Suggested Reading
Ivana Milojevic and Sohail Inayatullah, "Futures Dreaming: Challenges from Outside and on the Margins of the Western World."

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream (A non-Western utopia)

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed


(Next month: Feminist Utopias: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?)

A book of wisdom: The Dispossessed...

Some books are beautiful.

Some novels are exciting, and thrilling, and full of adventure.

Some stories are full of the wisdom of their authors.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is so beautiful it brings tears to the eyes—you don't read it, it sings to you; it is so full of adventure and excitement that you run alongside the characters, feel their pain and their joy and their desperation and their hope; it is so full of the writer's wisdom that three times during the reading of it I had to dig out a pencil and scrawl a copy of a particularly amazing passage on the scrap of paper I was using as a bookmark.

From page 113  (Panther 1975 edition):

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

From page 158:

There are souls ... whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

From page 205:

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or  soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience. [...] Though it might seem that [the] insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of a promise or a vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful.

Y is for Young Adult

The Young Adult (YA) genre has come a long way since I was a teenager. Back in my day (!) we had to supplement books by the likes of S.E. Hinton with novels for adults. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it meant that I was introduced to fully-realised feminist role models such as Dr Susan Calvin in Asimov’s "Robot" series and Patricia Luisa Vasquez in Greg Bear’s "Eon". But even though these strong female role models were a vital part of my formative years, I would have loved to have read about characters I could have identified with more.

The emergence in recent times of a wider YA body of fiction is both reassuring and welcome. Being a young adult can be so challenging that it is important that these readers have plenty of material to see them through their often difficult adolescent and teenage years.

But how much of present-day YA fiction is speculative?

Contemporary YA showcases recognizable science fiction tropes, such as time-travel in Rebecca Stead’s "When you Reach Me". But it is in the dystopian themes that socio-political elements are more prominent, for example in YA books such as Scott Westerfield’s "Uglies" series, where the pursuit of the body beautiful is taking to devastating degrees or the setting of "The Chaos Walking" trilogy by Patrick Ness, where not even an individual’s thoughts are private.

By contrast, another sub-genre in YA fiction — paranormal romance — could not be deemed speculative. The most famous female character in this genre, Bella in Stephanie Meyer’s "Twilight" novels, is neither empowered nor independent; she doesn’t care about her schooling or future career, and neglects her friends in favour of spending time with her boyfriend. This submissive streak can also be seen in the mortal female counterparts to the male fallen angels in Lauren Kate’s books and again with those of the sexy fairy kings in Melissa Marr’s "Wicked Lovely" series.

Luckily there are plenty of alternatives to this paranormal romance category. The most influential book I read as a young adult was Isabel Allende’s "The House of the Spirits", so it made me very happy to see such an accomplished speculative fiction author writing for young adults. In her YA books "The City of the Beasts", "The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon" and "The Forest of the Pygmies", Allende touches on humanitarian issues such as child slavery and inequalities between the developed and developing world. She also sets out to challenge perceptions about what makes a culture “civilised”.

No article on YA speculative fiction can fail to mention the legacy of the masterful storyteller Ursula le Guin. "The Wizard of Earthsea" spawned a legion of young adult novels that followed the pattern of its story: a setting in a walled city where a young person of humble origins becomes an apprentice to a sorcerer. Books such as Joseph Delaney’s "Wardstone Chronicles", Trudy Canavan’s "The Black Magician" trilogy, Garth Nix’ "Old Kingdom Series" and William Nicholson’s "Wind on Fire" trilogy all pay homage to this original idea. Ursula le Guin’s contribution to speculative fiction has been phenomenal - for example with her exploration of gender in "The Left Hand of Darkness" or her strong female characters in her YA novel "Tehanu".

Speculative fiction for young adults offers an exciting opportunity to forge a storyworld where limits can be pushed to the extreme to shed light on the problems facing our society. An author has the power to make her readers think differently, and this is especially true for YA authors whose audience is in the process of learning about themselves and the world around them. So if you’d like to submit a YA speculative fiction story to "The Future Fire", push boundaries as far as you can. Your readers will love you for it.

G is for Gestalt

‘Gestalt’, as we endeavor to use the term here, can refer to the science fiction concepts relating to an alternative somatic existence, ‘special powers’ or alternative in/human form. Use of the word in this manner and for our purposes here, derive from Theodore Sturgeon’s sci-fi novel More Than Human where early protagonist ‘Lone’, who is a telepath, refers to himself as a ‘homo-gestalt’. Gestalt can be analysed through a socio-political lense on the basis that it presents a universe of inequality that transcends the sociological or economic advantages humanity can be either born with or attain. Further to the privilege an individual can receive from his/her background, such fiction presents a novum of physical or mental advantage beyond what we deem ‘natural’. While straightaway the graphic novels of Marvel and DC Comics perhaps come to mind, this can be far subtler than capes and muscles bulging beneath spandex. It might more simply be considered an examination of how fiction portrays post-human, or ‘more than human’ and subsequently, the societal and political implications of this.

Firstly, being more than human is not always appreciated by the fictional, yet on some level contemporarily reflective, society. While the X-Men each have a tragic back-story of abuse, disaffection and persecution, a better example of this might be the children which feature in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. They have to keep their ‘powers’ secret as such abilities would render them as ‘blasphemies’ in an unenlightened and intolerant religious community. The individuals repression of these abilities, or at least a wider examination of how normative society treats ‘the other’ is arguably a rich source of conflict for writers to explore in their narratives. Widening the net of this application, such exploration can be seen in novels like Dracula and Frankenstein. It might be suggested that the socio-political elements of both of these classics confer the deep fear of ‘the other’ and how such powers are both considered wrong and unnatural. Therefore hiding from society, or repressing what is natural, has significant thrust in such texts.

This analysis can be expanded further if you consider how sociologically and politically ‘the other’ is treated in society. Being different, a minority, or an ‘out group’ member has significant impact of life choices, chances and opportunities. Arguably, belonging to any stratified group that isn’t white, male, able-bodied, straight, cis and middle/upper-class, can empirically restrict life opportunity and similar obstacles faced by characters in literature who are ‘more than human’ can perhaps reflect this on a thematic level.

It might further be suggested that somatic super-powers and economic power/influence can be almost interchangeable if we analyse the texts unaffected by the writer’s sympathy, or lack of, for the protagonist(s). The powers tend to be born with, acquired by accident or somehow bestowed upon a character rather than something they earn and work towards. We could deliberate on what this implies about the wealthy and powerful in our society: royalty, those born into wealthy families or any form of inherited privilege. Does reader sympathy of literary characters with more than human abilities, legitimise or support the inherited power of contemporary society’s elites? Perhaps a more progressive liberal ideology would oppose the inheritance of such power, especially if we consider the incredibly wealthy backgrounds of politicians who go onto govern a society made-up predominantly of those without such privileges. However, champions of individualism might see these texts differently, instead considering them as a legitimisation of inherited power. Such narratives can subsequently exhibit an kind of vulgar libertarianism that propagates notions of privilege over fairness. The political message of a story submitted to The Future Fire is therefore an important component to demonstrate with coherence and accuracy. Perhaps especially so when concerning ‘gestalt’, as such narratives may be erroneously perceived as containing a subtext which endorses unfairness and inequality.

Even within texts that consider the ‘more than human’, there can exist an array of conflicts and issues that present opportunities for explorations in the narrative. Authors such as Ursula LeGuin, for example in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, have been able to consider and explore alternative versions of life that transcend so much of what we consider normative regarding gender. Although dealing with aliens, the reader has to consider such texts as a mirror to his/her human norms and values. It demonstrates that ‘more than’ humanity or, by extension, the ‘different yet similar’ allows for self-reflection- another valuable tome for authors to address.

With a principal component of ‘gestalt’ being difference, there are arguably a wide variety of themes which could work within the ethic of The Future Fire. ‘Difference’ perpetually creates elements of distrust within society, consider again the ‘blasphemies’ within The Chrysalids or the way in which the writers of X-Men include political perspectives, usually negative, towards the ‘mutants’. Gestalt narratives might be created which perhaps include a correlation between the way in which characters of ‘homo-gestalt’ are treated by a fictional society and the way minority groups are stigmatised in contemporary society. For example, could the story be a reversal on the way disability is discussed in society? Perhaps a perspective on what is natural and unnatural could be explored, or further, an epistomological consideration of how society defines normality might also also work. Texts that attempt to deal with what might also be called Human 2.0 have been popular in science fiction, especially in light of scientific discoveries such as atomic power and genetic code. Therefore such narratives remain an interesting way through which to explore implications for such research, either good or bad. The vector between which science and society creates any number of socio-political discourses, and good stories play with these new and unexplored spaces.