A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Here’s a series of links to some very interesting, boomarkable articles about women writers. Fantastic reading.

Margaret Fuller from rom The Nation:

In the first half of the nineteenth century, although a fair number of her sex among abolitionists and suffragists were brilliant, it was Margaret Fuller, world-class talker and author of the influential treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), who stood in the allotted space, alone in a sea of gifted men, most of whom chose to denature her—she thinks like a man—as they could not believe they had to take seriously a thinking woman.

Adrienne Rich at Slate.

No American poet has so fully created a body of work constellated around the notion that change is essential to being free. If A Change of World is mostly juvenilia, nonetheless Rich’s concerns are vibrantly alive in the shadows. Over and over one encounters in her early books the words that became the mature Rich’s touchstones: “will,” “change,” and “choice.” “The moment of change is the only poem,” she later wrote.

Fascinating essay on Susan Sontag at Tablet Mag.

It was not easy to be so serious. Sontag writes movingly and very candidly about the way her great intelligence made life and relationships difficult for her, starting from early childhood: “Always (?) this feeling of being ‘too much’ for them—a creature from another planet—so I would try to scale myself down to their size, so that I could be apprehendable by (lovable by) them.”

And another essay on Sontag at Book Forum.

The animating force at the heart of everything Sontag wrote—the cultivation of aesthetic and intellectual experience—is not properly speaking an idea; it’s a stance, or an attitude. It is itself a way of moving. There is no magnum opus or theoretical treatise that we can point to as Sontag’s distinct contribution, no “takeaway” we can pierce under glass. So it may not be very surprising that since her death eight years ago, the many provocations of her thinking have drifted out of view to make room for the more obvious fact of her celebrity. Besides, she’s a woman; we make good icons.

At The New Republic, statistics prove a literary bias against women.

The place of women in the literary world is still as urgent an issue as it has ever been. I worry that other women of my generation, having taken their admission to this world as a natural right, have grown as complacent as I have been. But admission is not the same thing as acceptance. And what the reception of literature by women over the last few decades—longer, of course, but let’s keep to a manageable scope—shows us is that acceptance is a long way off.

The gentlemen at Commentary disagree.

…the claim that “men publish the majority of the reviews in American literary publications,” advanced as if it were prima facie evidence of bias, obliterates the individual history of at least one man who has championed several women writers.