She Who Had Voice, Let Her Have Spoken!

Following on from Nicola Griffith's Russ Pledge post in June, and the ongoing discussions about the literary invisibility of female authors* -

Since the end of May, guestblogger Anna at Echidne of the Snakes has been posting a Sunday series on A Literary Canon of Women Writers, beginning with Enheduanna of Ur (23rd century BCE).  She's now reached the thirteenth century, featuring the distinctly SF-friendly troubadour Marie de France.  The scope is global, the detail often considerable, and the vast majority of its subjects previously unknown to me.  But not, by any means, unknown to the literary communities of their day.  Highly recommended and a big eye-opener.  I'd be interested to hear other people's responses to it.

Echidne's archiving system is somewhat peculiar, and I can't find any way to link to the latest post directly, but it is easily found by a little scrolling down.  Direct links to all previous posts are provided at the top of the new one - though, because of said archiving system, they may initially appear not to be taking the reader to the post specified, even on broadband.  But a few seconds' wait will hit the target.


* I began to write 'women authors', before realizing that this required me to be cool with the phrase 'men authors', which scrapes fingernails down the slate of my soul. Though not as much as those charmings who freely refer to groups entirely composed of humans as 'males', 'females', 'whites', 'blacks', 'olds', 'youngs', 'clevers', 'stupids', 'sicks', 'healthies', and all those other adjective nouns which they deploy with impartial style and elegance.

Defaulty Spectacles

I was getting a distinct impression that Three Katherines of Allingdale had grown into a book disproportionately dominated by female characters - that is, above and beyond the deliberate focus suggested by the title and associated choices of perspective.

If true, this seemed out of true with the setting and subject matter.  Apart from the central Three Katherines, I'd have expected things to turn out equally at best. (Fairfields is, in its post-mediaeval way, considerably closer to an equal-opportunity society than our own. Its massively larger parent culture is, as my beta-readers for Katy Elflocks will know already, most traditionally and obnoxiously not.)

But I had reason to suspect that my perceptions weren't accurate, and that active female characters might appear more salient than their numbers or spotlight-time warranted, because they are not the conventional default in this sort of fantasy. On the other hand, so many of my all-time favourite characters from my personal pantheon have always been heroic and/or active women with agency and viewpoint - Cassilde Théret and Lies van Luyt; Kesti President and Kandakay Kaoring, Locket and Sapphire and Tawn; Tindally Myl of Qorth; my fanfictional instances of Nyssa and Tegan from Doctor Who; 'Hacki' Hackenbush and Lib Cody, Lena Rushwell and Temerity Pyke;  the Crocus and Celerian and Lowerry the Red Blade, Katj and Lylat and Savafy Bistirin Yon, to mention only those outside the Kateverse who've marked me most profoundly - that surely, surely any default I have is rather in the other direction?  I'd really be stretched to come up with a roster of men from my universes who come up to that mark!

Still, I thought, it wouldn't hurt to check.

Hoo boy.  Was I wrong, or what?

My dodgiest suspicions are confirmed.  In The Deed of Katy Elflocks alone, women do outnumber men 2:1 amongst the first rank of characters (see again: Three Katherines), but the ratio drops to simple parity when the other significant characters are counted.  In Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, women still retain much of their 3K edge in the top rank, but adding the much larger secondary cast of this work moves us slightly into a male majority.  So my background is pretty much as I'd consciously visualized it.  Yet even my own perception was of a cast, by guess, two-thirds female.

That's at least a thirty percent overestimate.  And I'm the author, and I knew what I was shooting for in the first place!

I'm not prepared to fix perceptions by the pernicious lie of missing my mark so as to give the casual impression of hitting it.  The setting is painted truly.  It must stay that way.

The only solution I can think of offhand is to be especially vigilant for dullness and sameyness in the sections where a lot of the male characters congregate.  There's one particular plot-knot around the midbook where I had rather too many of them in holding patterns.  That's something I have to address anyway in the rewrite, which might narrow the disconnect between perception and reality.  Other than that, I can only see what my beta team and any future editor will come back with on this.

Still.  Sheesh!