Paula Fox – Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children ( Guardian profile, Paris Review interview) Lord knows, it’s on the shelf.)Įlena Ferrante – career-long review in The New Yorker: have already ordered Days of Abandonment. George Eliot – Middlemarch (It’s on the shelf. Jennifer Egan – A Visit from the Good Squad (Read and reviewed. Marguerite Duras – The Sailor from Gibraltar (well, I’ve read some ( The Lover) but years ago.

Joan Didion – Play it as it Lays (I’ve read the journalism, but never the fiction. I had a copy, but gave it away as a present. Worth another look I think, perhaps along with the Sheila Heti, if what I’m after in part in all of this is an answer to the question: is female consciousness different to male?)īarbara Comyns – Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead – Asylum review (I recently read her controversial story ‘ Adrien Brody’ on the recommendation of Sam Riviere. (I think I must have read a story or two, but this is a clear omission) Sybille Bedford – ‘fansite’: )Įlizabeth Bowen – short stories, The Last September, The Death of the Heart, To the North. Joan Barfoot – Gaining Ground – author website: Djuna Barnes – Nightwood (Likewise, have it. Nicola Barker – Darkmans (I have this, I’ve tried it, I haven’t really liked the earlier stuff of hers that I’ve read.) Later posts will try to make some sense of it all.

I’m listing all suggestions, which obviously risks making the list diffuse and unwieldy. Where the writer was un- or little-known to me, and I Googled them, I’ve added any links I found useful or interesting, for the benefit of the similarly ignorant.Ĥ9 names were suggested on the first day of asking, and more have been coming in. Where specific titles were suggested, I’ve listed them. I asked for recommendations and suggestions, and Henry Krempels asked me to post what people came up with, so here they are, in alphabetical order. I wrote yesterday about the coincidence in my reading of Ben Lerner’s über-useless-man novel Leaving the Atocha Station and Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers and its upshot that I’m going to spend a few months reading women writers, instead of my usual men-heavy regime, just to see if I can separate out my own prejudices and inclinations from the institutionalised sexism of publishing at large.

Gaining ground joan barfoot