Forgotten Books by Women

[Meg]

I just stumbled on this: Why have you read ‘The Great Gatsby’ but not Ursula Parrott’s ‘Ex-Wife’?

Both “Ex-Wife” and “The Great Gatsby” are modern novels of love and loss, money and (mostly bad) manners. They’re set in New York and saturated with the energy, language and spirit of the time. [...]

At first, “Ex-Wife” was far more successful than “Gatsby,” blasting through a dozen printings and selling over 100,000 copies. It was translated into multiple languages and reprinted in paperback editions through the late 1940s.

Meanwhile, “The Great Gatsby” went through a mere two printings totaling less than 24,000 copies, not all of which sold. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had essentially been forgotten.

Moreover:

I’m convinced that the reason Fitzgerald’s novel is so ingrained in American life and letters has [...] everything to do with the way books were marketed and promoted over the arc of the 20th century.

Stories like this fascinate me. I love being shaken loose from received wisdom.

What are your favorite examples of books by women that are now obscure, but in their time were wildly popular, or praised by critics, or were at least as good as other works that are now canon?

 

[mrsmig]

Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, or any of her short stories. Most of her work centered on the relationships between women, and was an inspiration for better-remembered authors like Willa Cather.

 

[Infinimata]

Pretty much anything by Anna Kavan, especially her hallucinatory and dystopian Ice.

Ditto Karin Boye, for another hallucinatory/dystopian work, Kallocain. (I wrote about it here.)

Renata Adler, a critic and novelist (she wrote a flesh-ripping takedown of fellow film critic Pauline Kael), had some difficult but immensely rewarding fiction. Speedboat is the standout.

 

[Unimportant]

Everyone knows All Quiet on the Western Front, but everyone should read Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War by Helen Zenna-Smith (aka Evadne Price)

 

[Meg]

Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees. It's a fantasy novel from 1926, before the conventions of the fantasy genre were established, and it is unlike anything I've ever read. It's about a city of comfortable burghers who have rejected Fairyland to the point of refusing to even speak of it, but it comes creeping into their world in all kinds of unexpected ways.

I barely even remember the plot, but that's not what matters. What matters is the way that it evokes strangeness.

 

[ElaineA]

Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees. It's a fantasy novel from 1926, before the conventions of the fantasy genre were established, and it is unlike anything I've ever read. It's about a city of comfortable burghers who have rejected Fairyland to the point of refusing to even speak of it, but it comes creeping into their world in all kinds of unexpected ways.

I barely even remember the plot, but that's not what matters. What matters is the way that it evokes strangeness.

This description piqued my interest immediately, so I looked it up--thinking there was little chance I'd find it easily--and LO! It's entirely available. With a wide variety of covers. The best part? My library has an ebook version, so I've ordered it on Libby. I even have to wait 6 weeks because I'm 5th in line.

It was quite gratifying to find that, while the author may be somewhat forgotten (I know I'd never heard of her), the book is still in demand. I'm looking forward to reading it, so thank you, in advance, for highlighting it here, Meg!

 

[Chris P]

Angela Thirkell was an English author active from the early 1930s to her death in 1961. I read about half of Love Among the Ruins a number of years ago, but got distracted by something or other and not because the writing or story was bad. I think she was overshadowed by other writers in that genre at the time, such as Evelyn Waugh (who was male and also wrote a book titled Love Among the Ruins).

 

[Meg]

This got mentioned in another thread: Dune apparently borrowed heavily from The Sabres of Paradise (1960) by Lesley Blanch. The author of this article isn't slamming Dune, and argues that Dune pulled from lots of sources and did interesting new things with them. But this is another great example of a forgotten work.