The Greatest Female Author of All Time

Post Reply New Topic

Aside from Ayn Rand, for those she seems to instinctively offend, not for the greatness of her prose, but for her philosophy, it has to be Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot or Edith Wharton or Carson McCullers - rightly considered the female Dostoyevsky. Why people like Jane Austen is beyond me. If you like Austen, you have to like Wharton, the American Austen, and better.

Mine?

Ayn Rand.

Why?

Because her prose are incredible. I aspire to the day when I can write as well as she did. At least, with fewer edits. Had it been me, writing a novel the length of Atlas Shrugged, 600,000+ words, would have taken two or three years, not fourteen. But then, that's her prerogative, not mine. As does Atlas Shrugged sit as one of the greatest books ever written.

Anyone else have a favourite female author?

I recently got a book by Virgina Woolf and nearly purchased a book by Gaskell. Admittedly I've read very little from female authors.

The only female author I can think of automatically off the top of my head is J.K. Rowling.

Katherine Kurtz. Honorable mention to Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffery, and Andre Norton (who is actually female)

Rand was a terrible writer. Awkward, clunky prose. Cardboard characters. Silly attempts are literary devices. Dumb metaphors. Crass imagery. And her philosophy was shallow, infantile and little more than than hubris and narcissism. Heh, and she was a total hypocrite, relying on the same social services she despised other people for using because, surprise, she couldn't make enough money off her books. Typical right-wing nutcase--couldn't live up to her own ridiculous, unhinged ideology, the same ideology for which she condemned everyone else for not living up to. You need to read more, experience more of the world and get a better education if you think she was either a good writer or a good philosopher. Seriously, that's as tragic as it's laughable.

As a woman who studied philosophy in grad school and who is a writer myself, I find Rand an utter embarrassment to women in general. She seems to only appeal to people who are weak-minded and childish yet arrogantly convinced they are better and smarter than everyone else--kind of like Rand herself.

Some of my favorite female writers:

Virginia Woolf
Anna Akhmatova
Gwendolyn Brooks (I even got to met her--she was awesome)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mary Shelley
Katherine Anne Porter
Flannery O'Connor
Zola Neale Hurston
Harper Lee
Edna St. Vincent Millay

It may be trite to do so, but I put forward, like someone else did, JK Rowling. However, an extremely close second would be Lois McMaster Bujold with her Vorkosigan Saga.

Eww... Ayn Rand. Biggest egomaniac ever...

I can't pick one greatest female author ever, there are so many good female authors. But I would say that Karin Boye was a great writer. Her book Kallocain is a classic. I don't know if she is very famous outside of Sweden, but she should be.

Tove Jansson is one of the best.

It's taking me more than 14 years to get through Atlas Shrugged. It just seems to go on and on saying the same thing over and over again. Didn't someone speculate that she was an aspie? I could see that, due to what seems like rigid thinking to me.
I mean no offense. I loved the Fountainhead, because it made me realize that it was okay to just be myself and not just go along with what everyone else said even when I disagreed.

I don't really have a favorite female author though. Maybe Mary Renault? XD

...whom i've never felt the need to read, there are famous ones like Plath & Doris Lessing (who won the Nobel prize not so long ago); lesser known, like poets Tsvetaeva & Leonie Adams,; & contemporary novelists, among whom i have recently enjoyed the neo-noir Megan Abbott & the neo-Victorian Sarah Waters, as well as science fiction writer Gwyneth Jones, who i think has captured the enigma of contemporary reality better than anyone else now writing (with the possible exception of Don DeLillo).