Amazing women authors - an echo essay

Literary Ruffles and flourishes - An echo tribute to the success of women authors.

TRIUMPH OF THE ‘LIT’RY LADY’ published in The New York Times, by Tina Jordan

Tina Jordan

MaineWriter- This essay brought to mind the amazing success of women authors, especially recalling the creative talents who wrote the most popular books ever written, being Harriett Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Mitchell, and Harper Lee.

“The rivalry of the sexes!” blared a Times headline from 1905.

“Is woman crowding out man in the field of fiction?” The paper posed that question to a handful of top publishers, editors and booksellers.

“What woman can write as Shakespeare? Can any woman ever write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’? Did any woman ever live who could have written ‘Huckleberry Finn’? ... And what woman could possibly have written ‘Jude’?” harrumphed the bookseller Simon Brentano.

The publisher George H. Putnam dismissed the query as “absurd,” telling the paper that there were more men and women “doing excellent literary work” than ever before, “and the more both of them do the better.”

By 1907, things had changed. Women, the paper pointed out, had “been busy with their pens ... scribbling industriously, and, in plenty of cases, doing good work” for years. But with a few exceptions — Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë — male authors had long ruled book sales, “marching along proudly, without worrying about competitors in the weaker sex.”

Of the 28 most popular books published between 1895 and 1902, 25 were by men. By 1904, though, the situation had begun to improve — and 1907 was a record-breaking year for women’s book sales, thanks in part to Edith Wharton’s “The Fruit of the Tree.”


“Records of the past 10 years show startling progress by the ‘lit’ry lady’ from the commercial point of view,” The Times reported. “The really striking thing about the encroachments of women on the preserves of man in book writing is not to be found on the purely literary side, but on the business side of the situation. Women are writing more and more best-sellers.”

Flash forward 112 years, and both the No. 1 books are by women — Delia Owens’s novel “Where the Crawdad Sings” tops the fiction list, where it has been for much of the past year, and Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated,” which came out in early 2018, once again rules the nonfiction list.

Westover told Parade recently that “the book has sold better than I could ever have expected. Honestly I don’t think I’ve processed it.” In an interview with She-files, she said the high point came when Barack Obama put “Educated” on his summer reading list. “And he called me. It was weird, totally weird. They called me and asked if I could take a call with him. I was like, ‘I can squeeze that right on in.’”

By Tina Jordan