I simply refused to accept their view of bigger and better. I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither. I really do. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

The expectations of limited appeal don’t just affect women’s writing, or books about women, but also those by or about Indigenous, culturally diverse, queer, working-class and transgendered people, who are all subject to a narrowing of their experiences within fiction. In “ They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist ,” Jenny Zhang talks about the exotic lure of the non-white writer, and the limitations placed on such writers in terms of representation or tokenism and subject matter. In 1987, Toni Morrison declared that she was reclaiming the label of “black woman writer,” stating that those who wouldn’t label her as such “were trying to suggest that I was ‘bigger’ than that, or better than that.” Instead, she says,

I don’t know what it is about our books that make them seem uninteresting to men: is it that we actively seek out female writers, or that we are tackling so-called feminine subjects? Why, for example, aren’t friendship and parenthood viewed as universal themes when they are written by women? Hustvedt reminds us that women writers attract mostly women readers (about 80 per cent, according to a 2015 Goodreads survey), while male writers tend to attract an audience that is 50-50, or as Hustvedt puts it, “men who write fiction have an audience representative of the world as a whole while women don’t.”

Interestingly the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey 2015 has confirmed a bias in the world of North American publishing, revealing it to be a world where white straight women dominate, which conforms Marlon James’s statement that “we writers of color spend way too much of our lives pandering to the white woman.”

While the Lee & Low report found that women made up 78 per cent of the publishing industry, this number decreased to 59 per cent at the executive level. A recent piece on The Toast demonstrates that publishing is a gendered industry and, like all feminized professions, chronically under-paid. Obviously the prevalence of white women in the publishing industry needs to be tempered by the inclusion of other minorities, but prevalence itself does not mean that their work is valued in our culture. Prizes remind us that what matters most are stories written by men or about men, or in an acceptably masculine way (non-sentimental and with sufficient thrust). Women may dominate the publishing fields, they may have more of these jobs and have an easier time getting into print, but this seems like a poor consolation. Does it matter if more work is being published by women if it’s not reviewed, if their texts don’t end up on school book lists or aren’t featured in our most recognized publications?

Anyone who works in this field knows about what Claire Vaye Watkins has termed the “little white man deep inside of all of us”—the standard of literary excellence that has been ingrained by our education, by the books we are pushed towards and the ones that never appear on reading lists. She’s talking about the people whose approval we seek as we write our work, the opinions that matter most. I know what she means. In the last few years I have found myself turning away from the idea of being a fiction writer. It wasn’t a choice, but something that has happened slowly, quietly. It has probably been helped along by all the lovely rejection slips I’ve gotten for my quiet stories about women. I collected quite a few of these polite notes, thanking me for my interest, telling me how beautiful my writing is and, sadly, that it doesn’t t right now. Please feel free to send us more work, they encourage. But I don’t feel encouraged.

Anyone who argues that good work will always be published and valued is not paying attention to the way in which our literary culture dismisses, maligns, or limits the work of anyone deemed to be other to the white male writer.