Letters The other half of the literary canon Jonathan Bate (The week in books, Review, 9 October) says that he supports Michael Gove's call for the restoration to the school syllabus of the big names of the English literary canon (even though, as he points out, they have never left it) and he goes on to argue that "English literature has been full of diversity, dissent and multiethnicity since its very origins". His evidence for this takes the form of the "oppressed ... 4ft 6in Roman Catholic hunchback" Alexander Pope. But, in keeping the with vast majority of the other writers listed by Bate and Gove (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Austen, Dickens and Hardy), Pope was also a man. In Gove's list of nine writers only Austen (I'm assuming he means Percy Bysshe, not Mary) flies the flag for the other 50-plus percent of the population while, according to Bate, English literature had a father (Ossian, Julius Caesar, Caedmon) but apparently no mother. Even if we accept Bate's contention that the traditional literary canon (or "repertoire") has always been "full of diversity, dissent and multiethnicity", this pertains to differences between male writers and their works. As feminists have been pointing out for 40-plus years, the traditional canon excludes the voices of women, of whatever race, religion, social background, sexuality, or physical stature. Those same feminists have also been busy recovering the "lost" works of historical women and have made it clear that women had an essential role in