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From the Archives — a Dooney’s series revisiting pieces we’ve published over two decades. This International Women’s Day photo-essay first appeared on March  8, 2016. Today, seven years later, seemed like a good time to take a second look. Of course, “Women I Read” is intended as a kind of game. It asks you, “Who would you put on your list of the writers you read?” 

A few years ago, a mid-list Canadian novelist teaching at a university in Toronto was asked by an interviewer why there were no women authors in the syllabus of the course he taught about the novels he loved the most. “I’m not interested in teaching books by women,” he replied. “I don’t love women writers enough to teach them; if you want women writers go down the hall.”

The outrage and sputtering lasted through at least half a news cycle. After the predictable uproar dissipated, the question I asked myself was, “Who are the women writers I read?” The difficulty in answering that question was not finding women writers whose work I love, but keeping the list within manageable limits. Here’s the visual version:

Gertrude Stein. Stein portrait by Picasso. Photo: Man Ray.

Colette.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Doris Lessing.

Nadine Gordimer.

Simone de Beauvoir.

Marguerite Duras.

Virginia Woolf.

Hannah Arendt.

Ursula Le Guin.

Susan Sontag.

Assia Djebar.

Toni Morrison.

Christa Wolf.

Nicole Brossard.

Naomi Klein.

Slavenka Drakulic.

Margaret Randall.

Barbara Tuchman.

Germaine Greer.