It is hard to believe that this piece is still necessary. We long for the day when we don’t have to single out authors – or anyone of any walk of life, for that matter – for their gender, but here we are again. Last weekend, author and New Journalism father Gay Talese was asked to name women writers who had inspired him at a Boston University event, to which he answered: “None.” He reportedly went on to say that “educated women don’t want to hang out with anti-social people,” according to what journalist Amy Littlefield, who was in the audience, told the Washington PostUndoubtedly, the hashtag #womengaytaleseshouldread started bubbling on Twitter, and plenty of suggestions were made – here is a tiny selection from authors:We have celebrated female authors on the Books site before, but we contacted some of our readers and asked them to tell us which female writers shaped their lives. Here are 10 of the most mentioned authors, in no particular order, and what our readers had to say about themIn my twenties, I was a foreigner in London. Reading Lessing’s subtly brilliant short story Out of the Fountain, I had that Keatsian feeling of a new world coming into view. As I read my way into the books of this fellow exile, her range and depth emerged – from psychological portraits in granular detail to vast explorations of cataclysm and survival. Class, sex, old age, childhood, the inner workings of politics, the wilder shores of the psyche – she embraced complexity and got under the skin of the human condition with piercing acuity. This was writing from the frontiers of experience and utterly mind-stretching.
