Suggested Reading for the Students of a Certain Professor

By Kim

This past week a University of Toronto professor and Giller award nominee stirred up a media backlash with his comment that he is not interested in teaching books by women, Chinese authors or, oddly, books by his fellow Canadians. (For the full article, click here.)

As you can imagine, this professor is taking a beating and it's not just women authors who are irate. Yesterday author Karen Essex started a thread on Facebook calling for everyone to stage a boycott – instead of buying this professor’s book, buy something by a female author or a Chinese author or, preferably by a female Chinese author. Historical fiction writer C.W. Gortner  (a man) promptly posted that he was “getting everything Pearl S. Buck ever wrote, plus a little Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende on the side to complement [his] F*** You platter.”

C.W., if you are reading this, please know that I added one of your books into the stack of a half-dozen or so books by minority women I bought today. I'm sure you won't mind.

For students of the-professor-who-won’t-be-named-here, the contributors of What Women Write put together a list of potential authors for you to study should you grow bored of reading all the “serious heterosexual guys” your teacher has on the syllabus. We have, I think, managed to include women authors from every continent. Many of these writers are widely accepted as part of the literary canon and are often taught in university classes. Some have won major awards. Others have just written some damn fine books.

As a big fan of Canadian literature, I threw in quite a few authors who hail from your side of the border.

I urge you (and everyone really) to buy or borrow some of these books. 

Toni Morrison – Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved

Pearl S. Buck – The Good Earth, A House Divided

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

Gloria Naylor – Mama Day

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility

Sojourner Truth - Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave

Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Sonnets From the Portuguese

Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Emily Dickenson – Poems

Louisa May Alcott – Little Women, Little Men

Christina Rossetti – Verses

George Eliot – Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede

Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Kate Chopin – The Awakening

Edith Wharton – The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence

Willa Cather – The Song of the Lark, My Antonia

Gertrude Stein – The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Joyce Carol Oates – Black Water, What I Lived For

Madeleine L’Engle – A Wrinkle in Time

Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar

Flannery O’Conner – Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away

Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child, The Good Terrorist

Nadine Gordimer – July’s People, Burger’s Daughter

Jamaica Kincaid – Annie John, The Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy

Isabelle Allende – House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna

Eudora Welty – The Optimist’s Daughter, Losing Battles

Betty Smith – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Joan Didion – The Last Thing He Wanted, Democracy, The Year of Magical Thinking

Annie Proulx – The Shipping News, Brokeback Mountain

Jane Urquhart – Map of Glass, The Underpainter, The Stone Carvers

Margaret Laurence – The Diviners, The Stone Angel

Ursula K. Le Guin – The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, The Farthest Shore

Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

Isak Dinesen – Out of Africa, Babette’s Feast

Jhumpa Lahiri – Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake

Anne Sexton – Live or Die, The Book of Folly

Katherine Mansfield – In a German Pension, The Garden Party

Sue Monk Kidd – The Secret Life of Bees

Adeline Yen Mah – Falling Leaves, Watching the Tree

Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie – Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun

Amy Tan – The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife

Alice Munro – Dance of the Happy Shades, The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love

Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, Life Before Man

Alice Walker – The Color Purple

Gwendolyn Brooks – Annie Allen, We Real Cool

Adrienne Rich – On Lies, Secrets and Silence; The School Among the Ruins

Elizabeth Strout – Olive Kittridge

Geraldine Brooks – March, Caleb’s Crossing, Year of Wonders

Thrity Umrigar – The Space Between Us, The Weight of Heaven

Ann Patchett – Bel Canto

Sally Gunning – The Widow’s War, Bound, Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard

Anne Tyler – The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons

Bebe Moore Campbell – What You Owe Me, Brothers and Sisters

Elizabeth Berg – Open House, Durable Goods, Talk Before Sleep

Kate Morton – The Forgotten Garden, The Distant Hours

Cathy Marie Buchanan – The Day the Falls Stood Still, The Painted Girls

Dani Shapiro – Devotion, Slow Motion

Barbara Kingsolver – The Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven

J.K. Rowling – the Harry Potter series

Marilynne Robinson – Gilead, Home

Nikky Finney – Head Off and Split, The World is Round

Margot Livesay – The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The Missing World

Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies

Jane Smiley – A Thousand Acres

Sue Miller – While I Was Gone, The Good Mother, Inventing the Abbotts

Cheryl Strayed – Wild, Torch

Anna Quindlen – Black and Blue, One True Thing

Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding

Laura Ingalls Wilder – Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy

Margaret Dilloway – The Care and Handling of Roses With Thorns

Maeve Binchy – Tara Road, A Circle of Friends, Nights of Rain and Stars

Jacqueline Luckett – Passing Love, Searching for Tina Turner

Mary Oliver – American Primitive, New and Selected Poems

Rosamunde Pilcher – The Shell Seekers, September

Katherine Anne Porter – Ship of Fools
Lan Samantha Chang - All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost; Inheritance: A Novel
Yiyun Li - Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories 

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. If you have further suggestions, please feel free to offer them in the comments.