A Male Writer on Bias Against Women Writers

I have occasionally addressed the issue of whether or not there is now equality of the genders in the world of literature, most recently on 8/26/10 (writing about A.S. Byatt's contention that smart women writers are not welcomed) and on 9/4/10 (writing on the assertion made by some women writers that the New York Times Book Section is a "Boys' Club"). Now a well-respected male writer who lives partly in India and partly in the UK, Pankaj Mishra, writing about American literature, states that "the ruthless regularity with which white women novelists along with short-story writers, poets and essayists are excluded from the canon of 'great American writers' (long after the writers so beatified ceased to be readable) ought to make us suspicious." (The reason he specifies "white" women is that he believes "stories of ethnic minorities assimilating into American society" -- presumably by women writers of color as well as men -- are respected by the literary establishment.) Mishra writes of being asked by a reader in India to make up a list of the best American literature, and of finding that he rejected many of the "great" male authors for his list. He says, "Much of the American fiction I chose – for its formal and political daring, and, yes, universal implications – turned out to have been authored by white women writers, many of them virtuosos of short fiction. My list included Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick and Carson McCullers as well as such contemporary practitioners as Shirley Hazzard, Deborah Eisenberg, Jane Smiley, Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan" ("Pankaj Mishra on American Literature.” The Guardian, 9/11/10, http:www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/11/).