This post began as an attempt to consider ‘what sexes read whom and why’, a curiosity piqued by a finding published in The Guardian:

women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women.
(Nielsen Book Research 2021).

In my surroundings, this is categorically untrue. I rarely see my father, for example, without a book by a female author in hand, and I will associate the names of those revered writers of detective fiction, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, with my dad until my last breath.

But my plan to ponder the question of sexes and reading soon crystallized, like frost on glass, wending its way upward and outward in shimmering threads and metamorphosing into something unexpectedly personal: a reflection on the women writers who helped raise me, who challenged my assumptions, and who transformed the way I think and act.

These women hover at the edges of my vision as constant guides. Although they include a predictable cast—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Shelley—the ones I write about in this brief chronicle are luminaries who seem more magical by virtue of being somewhat less known. There are prose writers, yes, but there are also playwrights and, above all, poets.

Jeanette Winterson writes that poetry is ‘a finding place’, and so it was, and is, for me. The first poet I recall reading, or hearing read, is Rachel Field, a woman who marvels in the mystery of not knowing. ‘Something Told the Wild Geese’ awoke my five-year-old senses to the wonder of seasonal change. Field offered me a conception of the world as a place of magical transformation, and she achieved this with a single word, pregnant with possibility: something.

Something told the wild geese it was time to fly.
Summer sun was in their wings, winter in their cry.

Every year when those magnificent V-formations of Canada Geese wing their way toward warmer climes across a boundless sky, I recall the words of this poem.

As I grew a little older and experienced my first sucker punches of betrayal, I learned about forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—from Patricia St. John’s Treasures of the Snow, the story of two Alpine children, Annette and Lucien, whose lives are altered by a tragic accident. Guilt and rage tear apart their already fractured relationship before a harrowing adventure ultimately leads to forgiveness and redemption. The lessons from Annette’s wise grandmother, who tries to foster forgiveness in an embittered Annette, stay with me the most:

When love comes in, hatred and selfishness and unkindness will give way to it, just as the darkness gives way when you let in the sunshine.

I was struck by Annette’s capacity for both goodness and vindictiveness because even at a young age I was aware of a confusing feeling of two selves inhabiting my small body—one generous and one vengeful. Much later, Denise Levertov helped me understand and accept this duality. From her, I realized that I can be both a ‘woman of innocence’ who is ‘kind and very clean without / ostentation’ and ‘turbulent moon-ridden girl’ who is not. Ridding myself of one is not possible, for trying to fly from myself is futile. When we are in a fight against ourselves, peace can only come from the laying down of arms.

My love for poetry endures, but during my teens I began devouring plays, from which I learned life-shaping imperatives. Lilian Hellman’s Southern Gothic drama, The Little Foxes is a portrayal of greed and treachery in early-1900s Alabama. Regina’s drive for wealth pits her against her avaricious brothers and leads her to betray her dying husband. I view greed as the root of all evil. It destroys families, communities, nations, and the environment. It affects all living things, even the top brass (though they seem to deny its repercussions). In The Little Foxes, Addie, the family’s housemaid and the play’s moral centre observes,

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then, there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly.) Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.

I can’t change all the world’s evils, but I can choke greed in my small circle of influence by modelling generosity. Doing nothing simply ain’t right.

The plays also evolved my understanding of racism, and especially anti-Black racism. My hometown had deep racial divisions, but the violent words and deeds were mostly directed at newcomers from India and Pakistan. My community had very few Black people and so the heinous form of White Supremacy connected with Black bodies was revealed to me in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, about the Youngers, a Black family in 1950s Chicago whose dreams of upward social mobility are thwarted at every turn.

As a teenager reading A Raisin in the Sun, I would have said I wasn't racist, and I would have argued passionately that the best way to end racism was simple: don't be racist. I didn't know that we are all racist to varying degrees and that ‘not being racist’ isn’t good enough: we are complicit in racism if we are not actively striving to change it. To be anti-racist is to step so far out of our comfort zones we don’t know how we’ll ever return, and we won’t even be sure that we’ll want to.

As much as A Raisin in the Sun taught me about anti-Black racism, the play's centring of forgiveness is just as powerful. As I also learned from Treasures of the Snow, love is the highest law, even when others have hurt us—though in the play this is not in the context of racism. The twenty-year-old Beneatha Younger is livid with a family member who has badly hurt her and the family. Her mother—Mama—calls on her to love. Beneatha can’t fathom why or how. Mama says,

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he’s done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest … and he can’t believe in hisself because the world’s whipped him so!

These plays and others like them didn’t only influence the way I move through the world. They also fostered in me a deep love for theatre as a craft and led to my doctoral studies in drama and my work in professional theatre.

Anyone who has set their mind to a seemingly impossible task knows the feeling of overwhelm I experienced as I pursued my doctorate degree. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird inspired me whenever a deluge of reading threatened to drown me. The title comes from a piece of parental wisdom: when Lamott’s brother felt overwhelmed by a gigantic school report on birds, his father told him, ‘Bird by bird, buddy’. I held this maxim close and worked through my research book by book.

Another, more horrific form of overwhelm is one we experience with grief. My adult life has been strangely punctuated by the sudden and violent deaths of friends, and consequently I have often sought out literature that helps me work through spasms of shock and grief.

The Nobel Prize winning novelist Han Kang helps me by articulating truths too agonizing for me to put words to. The White Book, Kang’s lyrical meditation on colour but also on grief, perfectly encapsulates how we move through the pain of loss:

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

Jackie Kay's achingly poignant poem, ‘Darling’, is a constant solace: ‘The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.’ Why are we loved ones? Who are we to the poet? Is it because we are bound together as a community reckoning with grief? In the same poem, as well as in her novel, Trumpet, she cites the lyrics of a Scottish choral piece, The Mingulay Boat Song: ‘Heel y’ho boys. Let her go boys’. The first sentence might be read as ‘Heave ho, boys’, and the idea of working together through adversity resonates with me—and ‘let her go boys’ even more. Sometimes the dead needed to die. But as long as they live in our memory, they are also ‘still here holding our hands' (‘Darling’).

Grief is an ever-present companion, but so too is love—of people, of the natural world, of cityscapes and adventure and coffee and dark red wine. And words. Always words. In An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich inspires me to love all language even when its sense eludes us:

I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

I used to interpret these lines figuratively, understanding them to extend to reading in languages we don't understand or appreciating stunning imagery in an otherwise confounding work. As I reread them literally now, I am struck by how much more poignant they have become as my parents and partner all confront eye conditions and I myself have moved into a world of advanced myopia and double vision.

It feels impossible to stop. I haven’t yet argued for songwriters as poets and articulated how their lyrics changed and change me (Alanis Morisette—'you took me out to wine dine sixty-nine me / but didn't hear a damn word I said'—and Sarah McLachlan—'you are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie'). I haven’t referenced Marjane Satrapi whose portrayal of perseverance and self-acceptance sustains me (Persepolis) or the ways in which Louise Erdrich inspires me to yield to the moment (The Plague of Doves) and Aemilia Bassano (Lanyer) charges me to be proud of the knowledge that I seek (Salve Deus).

But stop I must, so I end with a great assertion of agency from the poet, Adrienne Rich (‘XXI’):

I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here.

Bibliography

Erdrich, L. The Plague of Doves. HarperCollins, 2008.

Field, R. Something Told the Wild Geese. Macmillan, 1942.

Hansberry, L. A Raisin in the Sun. Random House, 1959.

Hellman, L. The Little Foxes. Random House, 1939.

Kang, H. The White Book. Translated by Deborah Smith, Hogarth, 2018.

Kay, J. “Darling.” Darling: New and Selected Poems. Boodaxe Book, 2007.

———. Trumpet. Picador, 1998.

Lanyer, A. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. First published 1611. Edited by S. M. Woods, Penguin Classics, 1993.

Levertov, D. “In Mind.” Poetry, vol. 102, no. 1–2, p. 68, Oct.–Nov. 1963.

McLachlan, S. “Angel.” Surfacing, Nettwerk/Arista Records, 1997.

Morissette, A. “You See Right Through Me.” Jagged Little Pill, Maverick, 1995.

Rich, A. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–91. W. W. Norton, 1991.

———. Twenty-One Love Poems. Effie’s Press, 1976.

Sieghart, M. A. “Why Do So Few Men Read Books by Women?” The Guardian, 9 July 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women

St. John, P. M. Treasures of the Snow. CSSM, 1950.

Winterson, J. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Press, 2011.