A Thousand Ducks

For a while I was seeing a Chinese doctor, a lady from Beijing. Once, she asked about my family. I told her I am the eldest of four sisters.

"Four sisters!" she exclaimed. "No brothers?"

"Nope," I said.

"Oh, how happy! How lucky that is!" She couldn't get over it. "In China, they say, 'Two girls together sound like ten ducks,' so I think your house must be like a hundred ducks!"

The other night I was re-reading "A Room of One's Own." I was struck by Woolf's attention to our literary grandmothers. Without their words, we might not be writing ourselves. I don't usually think of literature in terms of its race-class-gender sources. Though I like literary criticism and traffic rather freely in theory, literature itself is different. There is something cheap about reading literature with an agenda; my own primary criteria are craftsmanship, creativity, and wisdom. Having said that, I think it is worthwhile to extrapolate from our literary heritage those authors who are our direct predecessors, in my case, women, and to put them together in a room of their own, to converse. Women writers are in a different lineage, lively, unique, and (as Woolf says) a bit warped, without any danger of running out of new things to say, neither isolated from the male literary heritage nor of it. There aren't that many (canonical) great women authors, comparatively, so the ones we do have merit special attention, and of those, many are not to my taste. These, though, are the ones whose voices I hear in my own mind -- close, urgent, and strangely familiar.

These are my grandmothers.

Gabriela Mistral

Flannery O'Connor

Zora Neale Hurston

Emily Bronte

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Julian of Norwich

Sandra Cisneros

Virginia Woolf

Simone de Beauvoir

Lady Murasaki Shikibu

Muriel Spark

Colette

Who are yours?