One of the articles I flagged for follow-up over the weekend because I was too busy to read them was this one from The Guardian. It talks about how the literary establishment in the US not only routinely ignores women writers, but has actually developed a vision of the Great American Novel that more or less demands that it be written by a man.
Many thanks to Maura for reminding me about it this morning. (Useful thing, Twitter.)
Whoa, all those words and no Ursula K. Le Guin? What the hell does that woman have to do to get on the radar anyway?
Yup, no Le Guin, no Patricia McKillip, at least in the article. I guess you have to buy the book to see who the 50 are. But who writes more beautifully than those two? One suspects James Tiptree and Octavia Butler would have been similarly slighted if they were still with us. So perhaps there is another kind of bias at work here.