written by Nemanja Stanković, English language and literature teacher
How many female authors are you acquainted with and how many of them have you read?
If you are like the majority of people, chances are that you will not have read many. It was during one of our previous literary courses that I came upon this realisation as well.
To begin with, the majority of our students were acquainted primarily with male authors. While there are certainly men who have left an immense literary bequest, one must not neglect, nor indeed deny, to mention the impact of some female authors throughout all ages whose influence is so vast and the magnitude of their works so powerful that they have just as well been able to leave an indelible mark when it comes to literature. Having this in mind, I therefore embarked on an endeavour and managed to compile a list of exactly those women whose literary opus I find to be invaluable.
Louise May Alcott, Little Women
When talking about female authors, I cannot but begin with Louisa May Alcott and her most popular and enduring novel Little Women. While it is no secret that Alcott interwove her work with autobiographical elements, it may have been just that which was able to entice and make generations of readers – whether they be young or old, male or female – fall in love with her March sisters. In spite of its tittle, the book itself is a far cry from being “girly,” for it tackles such perennial themes of war and peace, love and death, as well as the clash between an individual’s desire and duty towards his, or in this case, her family.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Next, we have one of Virginia Woolf’s greatest novels, namely Mrs. Dalloway. Heralded as a masterpiece of modernist literature, the novel employs the stream-of-consciousness motif and much like James Joyce’s Ulysses, portrays a single day of the protagonist’s life. In addition, it also tackles such topics as disillusionment, futility of life, and oppression as Clarissa is inundated with past recollections and present realities which provide her with an uncertain outlook for the future.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
In much the similar manner Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook chronicles the fractured lives of British women after the second world war. Framed by a third person narrative, the novel depicts the life of a writer, Anna Wulf, as it interweaves four of Anna’s notebooks which depict the different strands of her life. The notebook with the black cover recounts the protagonist’s African experience. The red one records her political life and disillusionment with communism. In the yellow one she writes about a heroine who relieves parts of her author’s own experience, while in a blue one she keeps her own journal. The last one, the fifth one, is The Golden Notebook in which the novels protagonist endeavours to bring the threads of all of her four notebooks together.
Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain
Having mentioned the disillusionment with communism, I could not omit Dubravka Ugrešić, one of the most prolific post Yugoslav authors, and her novel The Ministry of Pain whose central idea of how war damages anyone who comes into contact with it is bound to resonate with many of us. As such, it catalogues the possible effects of this damage among Croatian-Serbian-Bosnian and Albanian exiles. Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucić, a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom, like Tanja, are not officially refugees but are displaced and damaged, sometimes fatally so.
Ursula K Le Guinn, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and Margaret Atwood, The Hand Maid’s Tale, Life Before Man
The next two authors, Ursula K. Le Guinn and Margaret Atwood, inescapably complement each other. Although Le Guinn is primarily known for her fantasy and science-fiction work, it was her essay The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, that has had the most profound effect on me. Unlike the previous novels I mentioned, I am disinclined to describe the plot of this essay for it would be too revealing. Be content in knowing that if you read it, it will have left a profound effect on you as well.
As for Margaret Atwood, it seems almost impossible to speak of her work without mentioning her magnum opus The Hand Maid’s Tale and for a very good reason. As one reviewer puts it, it is ‘funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing; a scathing satire, a dire warning, and a tour de force.’ Her other novel, Life Before Man, on the other hand, will perchance be less familiar to many. As a multi-perspective novel, Atwood puts into the foreground a deteriorating marriage and the ramification of the protagonists’ extra-marital affairs. By assuming multiple points of view, male and female, Atwood allows one to experience both sides of the relationships all the while depicting the banality of modern life.
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where are You and Dolly Alderton, Everything I know about Love
With the similar vein in mind, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and Dolly Alderton’s bestselling autobiography Everything I know about Love tackle relationships as their topic as well. As such both novels abound with the themes of romance, friendship, learning to navigate friendships, precarity, social class, loss and love.
Tony Morrison, The Bluest Eye and Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
The last two authors I would include are authors whose novels, in addition to all of their individual themes, likewise share one theme in common: that of race. Tony Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, whilst being slightly embroidered with autobiographical elements here and there, tells a story of a black, eleven-year-old girl named Pecola Breedlove who yearns and prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she may be just as beautiful as all the blonde, blue-eyed children of America. Behind a child’s yearning, ultimately lies the tragedy of its fulfilment.
Similarly, Yaa Gyasi’s award-winning debut Homegoing is an agonising tale, which by employing not only different perspectives, but different generations, chronicles the life of two sisters who are separated by slavery and through their lives, and the lives of their subsequent descendants, we are treated with a chilling retelling of Black history as the images of Africa, the plantations of the Mississippi, Harlem dive bars run their course.
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