In her utterly superb writing, Joanna Russ discusses all the techniques that have been used to suppress women authors, keep them from the canon, and dismiss their work—from lauding their one exceptional work as separate, unusual, to isolating them from their fellow authors and community, to labeling their choice of topics as immodest or confessional or particular—and much more. How to Suppress Women’s Writing is a must-read, superb and now covered in my annotations, highlights, and underlines.
She emphasizes that the solution is not bringing women one by one into an already set canon but by allowing for multiple “centers,” multiple ways of writing and of great literature. She also does a good job in an afterword of highlighting her own privilege and describing how her categories can be applied to many different marginalized groups.
(Note: I thought Jessica Crispin’s forward was so awful (she does the same thing to women writers that Russ literally describes in this book, describes Russ as an exception who wrote unlike other ’80s/’90s icons, then claiming she’s been left out of a literary canon of those women SFF authors, which she has not) that I carefully removed it from my volume of the book.)
Content warnings for sexual assault, misogyny, suicide.
