PEACH, Linden. Women Writers, in: COX, Ailsa, ed. Teaching the Short Story. London: Palgrave, 2011.

() short stories written by women are read as part of literature and writing courses but in the former they tend to be studied as specific texts within a themed or period context and in the latter examined primarily from a practice-based perspective. (60) Many authors who have published important contributions to the development of the short story, such as Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter, are still better known for their novels, while many writers who start out publishing short stories aspire to writing a novel or only publish collections of short stories when they have earned a reputation with longer fiction. The reasons for this are that the novel is more highly valued as a literary achievement than the short story; that most writers relish the opportunities and challenges provided by the novel; and that few writers can earn a living from writing short stories. (61) First, the publishing of writing by women in the second half of the twentieth century has been a cultural phenomenon and the short story has featured in this renaissance, albeit not as strongly as in the case of the novel and poetry. (61) Second, as I have argued elsewhere, the story from which womens writing has emerged is not simply about women, or even about feminism; it is about the way in which women and feminism are implicated in social structures (PEACH, 2007, p. 7). Thus, such writing is about power, politics, nations, history, culture and community. It also shares with that of other marginalized groups a profound concern to create art that interrogates the different socio-cultural contexts in which we all live. (62) () the test of time is not innocent of gender, racial and class politics or of geocultural bias. (62) It is difficult to ignore the influence of women modernists, especially Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, on the development of womens short fiction. However, they are more generally acknowledged in literary criticism for their contribution to modernist fiction than the womens short story as such. () However, the links between the early and the late twentieth century short stories by women, between what has come to be known, not uncontentiously, as first and third wave feminism to which I shall return shortly, are quite profound. (63) The critical approach that seems to have inspired the majority of collections and anthologies of women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is one that focuses upon the exploration of womens lives in and through their particular socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts, a dimension that literally historical surveys tend to eschew or minimise. () However, there has been a tendency in criticism to overlook the political in Woolfs and Mansfields fiction in favor of the private and to pay insufficient attention to the extent to which the private in modernist writing is political. (63-64) () the themes that are painted in somewhat broader brushstrokes in the work of the later writers to whom I shall turn shortly: exclusion, intolerance and prejudice. () we can also see in Woolfs work, on the narratives of the everyday and upon movements of the mind could not be more relevant to women especially those who experience not only gender but class, ethnic and sexual prejudice who have to renew the struggle between empowerment and disempowerment upon a daily basis. (64, 5) () the third wave links feminism to recognition of a new-found diversity, racial and sexual, as much as it is associated with an interest in popular culture. (66) As David Dabydeen has said: The problem with postmodernist theories is that they tend to dismiss presence as a kind of metaphysical conceit and valorize absence, aporia and kenosis (1997, 13551). (66) The short story seems to have enabled James to experiment with different voices and to write a language of difference which might not have been possible if she were writing a novel. (68) Jamess realism is typical of much short fiction by contemporary Welsh, Irish and Northern Irish and

Scottish women writers that seeks to push back the boundaries around gender, sexual identity, family and community. (68) Reading Jamess and Britos stories together, and in context with the work of the Irish writer Emma Donoghue to whom I shall turn in a moment, gives the reader a true sense of what third wave feminism, alluded to earlier, involves. Sometimes accused of reinventing the wheel, the kind of feminism we find in writers such as these is exciting because of the way in which the post-1990s womens short story brings together women of different countries, classes, backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities as well as women who are straight, gay, bi and transgender. Second wave feminism, associated with the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was by comparison hardly ever global and remained a largely middle-class affair. However, third wave feminism is sometimes of different contemporary contexts. Thus, Britos work cannot be seen as separate form race-based movements of the mid and late twentieth century and also with the community and oral history projects of the 1980s and 1990s. (69) () a collection of short stories, as opposed to a novel, lends itself to multiplicity and polyphony. (70) Rosalind Miles says of the womans novel:
There is also much work for women writers still to do in continuing to explore the intimate aspects of their lives as women; as daughters, as mothers, in sexual relations with men, and with each other, or as women alone; besides the ongoing challenge of mapping those areas of experience still under patriarchal taboos (1990, ix-x). (70)

In her emphasis upon women of different nationalities, races and sexualities, through acquiring control over language and discourse, Carter bridges second wave feminism, with its emphasis upon language and political action, with third wave refocusing upon cultural discourse and diversity. (71) () short stories written by women bring to the fore womens struggles to free themselves from a range of distorting, restricting and marginalising discourses including those around sexuality, science and medicine, class race region and nation. (72) It is now a commomplace argument that Carter did not rewrite the fairy tale in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (), but borrowed ideas around which to write new tales, on subjects that had been previously marginalised, which had a more actively sexual female subject and emphasised the violence and abuse of women. The stories address taboo subjects but do so in a way that challenges the conventional view, resisted even by first wave feminists such as Woolf and Mansfield, that the dangers in facing women are imposed purely form outside. Female sexuality in Carters stories is active, chaotic and often savage whereas the learned femininity and sexual being in the patriarchal narratives is, usually, submissive and masochist. Thus, the space in which Carter is writing is one that is complex and ambiguous, resisting conventional notions of female sexuality, gender, desire domination, submission, sadism and masochism. (73) () Carters approach is more at the level of myth and discourse which she delights in puncturing. (73) () from Woolf and Mansfield through Angela Carter to late twentieth and twenty-first century women writers, the short story has allowed authors to pursue subjects that would not be sustainable in a longer form, or acceptable to a commercial publisher, and to explore and represent the diversity of womens experiences, backgrounds and voices. Whilst acknowledging that short fiction lends itself to marginalised subjects, it is important to ask questions about the nature of the space which what has been previously marginalised or silenced creates. The short story has proved an appropriate canvas for women writers to explore the complexity and anxiety within this space. When applied to the short form, Miless contention that women writers have more to do in continuing to explore the intimate aspects of their lives as women brings together modernist feminism, sometimes and not uncontentiously regarded as first wave feminism, and the interest of third wave feminism in diversity and the material reality of womens lives. (74)