There are certain women writers’ names that ring out in the Western canon: Austen, Alcott, Wharton, a handful of others. But if you don’t dig any deeper, you might get the impression that men are represented far more heavily in the canon because historically, they were the ones doing most of the writing. Turns out that’s not necessarily the case. Today’s writers are digging deeper and bringing more names to light — including women writers who were exceedingly popular in their day. One of my favorite books in this genre is Anne Boyd Rioux’s biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a contemporary of Henry James whose work was popular with readers and embraced by critics. Why isn’t Woolson’s name more well-known? Anne’s biography gets into several of the factors at play, but sexism is an obvious culprit, as was her early death, a possible but not proven suicide. The more we find out about woman writers of the past, the more we see that they belong as much in the canon as their male contemporaries: the question is simply who chooses who gets remembered, and Anne’s work on the topic is well worth reading.

Anne Boyd Rioux is the author or editor of six books about American women writers, including the Indie bestseller Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (Norton 2018) and Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Norton 2016), one of the Chicago Tribune‘s ten best books of the year. She is a professor of English in New Orleans and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, one for public scholarship. You can find her on BBC Radio, in the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

For her #read99women recommendation, Anne suggests THE WHITE HORSES OF VIENNA by Kay Boyle, another woman writer whose work should be better known. The title story from this collection won the O. Henry award in 1935, and Anne shares a fascinating, detailed examination of the story in its historical context on her blog. “What is truly remarkable about ‘White Horses’ is the way that Boyle predicts the devastating consequences of Nazism for Jews, at a time when very few people could see the Nazis as truly dangerous.” Should a story be able to stand alone for a modern reader without its historical context? Does separation from that context affect perception of the story’s quality? Literature asks big questions; only the reader gets to decide on a “right” answer.