Kat McAdaragh

We shouldn’t have to wait until a woman writer is gone to take her seriously.

There’s a quiet tragedy threaded through the history of women’s literature. So many of the voices we now praise were never fully heard in their own time. Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems—fewer than a dozen were published while she was alive. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity, buried in an unmarked grave. Sylvia Plath’s brilliance was acknowledged only after her death, her life reduced to myth before her words were given the attention they deserved.

This pattern is not a coincidence. It’s a cultural indictment.

Silenced in Life, Canonized in Death

There’s a particular reverence we reserve for women writers once they’re no longer here to speak for themselves. Their rawness, truth-telling, and unladylike rage become easier to tolerate and celebrate when they’re safely in the past.

Living women who write about things that unsettle us—grief, desire, madness, motherhood, violence—are still too often seen as too much. But once gone, their work becomes a legacy, no longer dangerous. We call them “ahead of their time” when, really, the truth is—we weren’t ready to listen.

Take Dickinson, who famously wrote, “Publication is the auction / Of the mind of man,” and chose instead to keep her poems in drawers, stitched together by hand. That refusal, or resistance, to public validation didn’t stop the world from canonizing her only after her death, as biographer Lyndall Gordon writes, “The Dickinson we know is largely posthumous.”

Lost in the Waiting

This delay in recognition isn’t just a personal tragedy for the writer. It’s a cultural loss.

What might Sylvia Plath have written had she lived longer and been supported rather than scrutinized? Her journals are filled with both brilliance and brutal doubt. In The Unabridged Journals, she writes, “I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”—a line that reads like both a wish and a warning.

Zora Neale Hurston, now a pillar of African American literature, died broke and forgotten. It wasn’t until Alice Walker, in her popular 1975 essay, In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, located her unmarked grave and resurrected her literary reputation that readers began to truly see her. Walker wrote, “We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away.” But the truth is, we often do—especially when those geniuses are women.

The Continuation

Today, women writers are still underrepresented in major literary prizes, reviews, and syllabi. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has documented for over a decade the gender disparities in bylines and critical attention. The pressure to be palatable, to avoid writing something “too niche,” or “too political,” is a shadow many women writers still write under.

Even when women gain recognition in their lifetimes, they are often remembered for their pain more than their prose. Plath is mythologized as a “madwoman,” Anne Sexton’s work is too often reduced to spectacle. Their deaths become shorthand for their genius—instead of the way they survived long enough to write anything at all.

Give Them Their Flowers Now

So what do we do to stop this pattern? — We stop waiting.

We support women writers while they are alive. We read them now. Share them now. Talk about them now. Nominate them for awards. Buy their books. Write about them. Teach their works. Honor their stories—especially the ones that make people uncomfortable.

We build a culture where women’s words don’t have to be exhumed or rediscovered. We honor the living voice instead of writing eulogies for brilliance we failed to see in the first place.