Where are the Women?

But I’ve realised something: when I think about the great novelists translated into English from other languages, disproportionately few of the names I come up with are women’s. For every Isabel Allende there’s a raft of José Saramagos, Gabriel Garcia Marquezes, Mario Vargas Llosas and Pablo Nerudas. Hardly any of the familiar names of pre-war European fiction belong to women: the odd female contender like Colette is barely even visible among the clamouring ranks of male giants like Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kafka, Proust, Mann and Dostoevsky.