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Tanis MacDonald | Author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female
Somebody pointed it out to me—somebody on the internet, of course—that hardly any of the books I’d studied in English class were written by women. Women writers were infrequently mentioned when I read books about books too. With one exception: I understood that women’s writing, such as it was, began with Jane Austen.
Then—I learned that Jane Austen had a past, via Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (1986). Suddenly I recognized that Jane Austen might have believed that a woman could write novels because she had read other novels by women. Those early women writers’ books—they were her internet: information that illuminates possibility.
Born in 1943 in Australia, Dale Spender started lecturing at James Cook University in 1974, before moving to London and publishing Man Made Language (1980). "Language,” she writes, “helps form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering, classifying and manipulating the world.” When I discovered her work, I was just beginning to understand relationships between language and society, beginning to assess complex systems that protect existing power structures, still sussing out the potential to disr
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Tanis MacDonald | Author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female