Ridiculous

[fpb]

I found out only recently, and with great irritation, that the translator of the standard English version of the epic of Gilgamesh, N.K.Sandars, was called Nancy and was a woman. I don't know why she would conceal her name in this way, or whether it had anything to do with her sex, but I could not help thinking about the way that Joanne Kathleen Rowling's publishers shortened her name to JK to prevent readers realizing that this author of adventurous stories about two boys and a girl was a woman herself. And then there is the strange phenomenon of the illustrious (if bitchy) British writer universally known as A.S.Byatt. I am not often heard to take this kind of positions, but I find this simply ridiculous. That in this day and age, the identity of a woman should be disguised in order to enter her into the artform practiced by Deborah the prophetess, by Sappho and the other Earthly Muses, by the Virgin Mary (the Magnificat), St.Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pisan, Teresa of Cartagena, Vittoria Colonna, St.Teresa of Avila, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sevigne', Jane Austen, Annette von Droste, the Bronte sisters, Louisa May Alcott, Mrs.Gaskell, and so on and so forth and so following, is ridiculous... sorry to repeat myself, but what other word is fitting? Or rather, it should be ridiculous, were it not that nobody can find the force to laugh. Have they ever gone away, the days of George Eliot, George Sand, and Currer Bell?

Comments

Female scholars

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Stupidity is everlasting, I suppose. And prejudice is, in my view, inevitable. I work, myself, in a fairly male-dominated field of research, for some reason; but I look further out and I see female Titans such as Marilyn Butler (English literary history), Ann Douglas (American ditto), Dorothea Wender (classics), Olga Davidson (Persian classics) - just a quick trawl through my files - then I really think that experience alone ought to silence this sort of nonsense. And literature as art has been open to women since literally the beginning of our civilization: Deborah's poem is the most ancient single item in the Bible, and Sappho belongs to the archaic period of Greek poetry. And then there is the possibility that the Odyssey may have been written by a woman...