I take the bigotry of high culture to be active. She says with some disbelief that some women actually thought Dorothy Sayers was a minor novelist until they read Gaudy Night . I read Gaudy Night , which I liked enormously, and still think Sayers is a minor novelist. I think great books, as distinguished from all other books, do exist. It is true, as Russ eloquently insists, that many of them have been left out of the literary canon because of racial, sexual, or class prejudice.
Fine writers are worth more.
Neglect is not corrected unless the quality of respect given to a writer and her work is what it should be. This hodgepodge suggests, among other things, that distinctions of excellence do not matter, whereas to me they do, and I am insulted as a writer on behalf of the excellent writers here who are treated in such a glib and trivializing way. I simply abhor the lack of seriousness in this approach to these writers. This is something Amerikans have trouble understanding. Wrong sex, wrong race, wrong family, and you haven't got it.