Editing Western canon (section)

==== Feminism and the literary canon ====
{{See also|Écriture féminine|List of American feminist literature|List of feminist literature|List of feminist poets}}
[[File:Sartre and de Beauvoir at Balzac Memorial.jpg|thumb|[[Jean-Paul Sartre]] and [[Simone de Beauvoir]] at [[Balzac]] Memorial ]]

Susan Hardy Aitken argues that the Western canon has maintained itself by excluding and marginalising women, whilst idealising the works of men.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hardy Aiken |first1=Susan |title=Women and the Question of Canonicity |journal=College English |date=1986 |volume=48 |issue=3 |pages=289–292}}</ref> Where women's work is introduced it can be considered inappropriately rather than recognising the importance of their work; a work's greatness is judged against socially situated factors which exclude women, whilst being portrayed as an intellectual approach.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hardy Aiken |first1=Susan |title=Women and the Question of Canonicity |journal=College English |date=1986 |volume=48 |issue=3 |pages=290–293}}</ref>

The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's [[Women's history|historical]] and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest.<ref name=Blain>{{cite book |author=Blain, Virginia |author2=Clements, Patricia |author3=Grundy, Isobel |title=The feminist companion to literature in English: women writers from the Middle Ages to the present |year=1990 |publisher=Yale University Press |location=New Haven |isbn=0-300-04854-8 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/feministcompanio00blai/page/ vii–x] |url=https://archive.org/details/feministcompanio00blai/page/ }}</ref>

However, in Britain and America at least women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century, and many major nineteenth-century British novelists were women, including [[Jane Austen]], the [[Brontës|Brontë family]], [[Elizabeth Gaskell]], and [[Mary Ann Evans|George Eliot]]. There were also three major female poets, [[Elizabeth Barrett Browning]],<ref name="Leighton">{{cite book|author=Angela Leighton|title=Elizabeth Barrett Browning|url=https://archive.org/details/elizabethbarrett00leig|url-access=registration|access-date=22 October 2011|year=1986|publisher=Indiana University Press|isbn=978-0-253-25451-1|pages=[https://archive.org/details/elizabethbarrett00leig/page/8 8]–18}}</ref> [[Christina Rossetti]] and [[Emily Dickinson]].<ref name="Bloo9">Bloom (1999), 9</ref><ref>Ford (1966), 122</ref> In the twentieth century there were also many major female writers, including [[Katherine Mansfield]], [[Dorothy Richardson]], [[Virginia Woolf]], [[Eudora Welty]], and [[Marianne Moore]]. Notable female writers in France include [[Colette]], [[Simone de Beauvoir]], [[Marguerite Yourcenar]], [[Nathalie Sarraute]], [[Marguerite Duras]] and [[Françoise Sagan]].

Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. [[Virago Press]] began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation.