Comments on: You little genius

By: loonunit

loonunit — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:17:05 +0000

harper lee for a girl wonder? where do we put shirley jackson?

By: anthony

anthony — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 18:45:00 +0000

marylin robinson, maybe

By: Laurie Paul

Laurie Paul — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:25:10 +0000

actually, looking back at your post, Austen doesn’t fit your criteria for a boy/girl wonder either, since she had more than one big idea.

By: Laurie Paul

Laurie Paul — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:23:03 +0000

Jane Austen wasn’t a plodder, she was an unrecognized girl wonder who died before the age of 40. I’m not sure how to classify Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Bronte, but clearly they were geniuses.

By: Cthomas

Cthomas — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:22:24 +0000

I was just reading an essay by Cynthia Ozick, in which she recalls being an unrecognized author as late as her mid-’30s.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 03:13:44 +0000

How about Helen Hooven Santmyer, who published her …And Ladies of the Club in 1984 at age 88?

By: Helen

Helen — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:50:48 +0000

Olga Masters, the Australian novelist, started when she was in her 50s after raising children.

(It’s rather hard to take seriously someone describing a topic about gender differences in age of first publishing success as “whining about sexism”. I guess you’d describe the post above as “whining about book titles”?)

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 21:00:33 +0000

ed writes: “An obvious example is what if Einstein lived in prehistoric times. He might have walked around wondering what the sun was made of, but he would have spent most of his time hunting and gathering. ”

I figure he’d have been some kind of religious figure. His questioning mind may not have come up with terribly scientific explanations for things, instead coming up with supernatural explanations.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:24:35 +0000

It’s rather hard to take seriously someone whining about sexism who just earlier penned the sentence “So ‘Wired Man’ is slightly more environmentally aware than he used to be, but just as insecure and rather implausibly hirsute.”

By: SamChevre

SamChevre — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:57:12 +0000

Willa Cather started writing young, but her best work was done after she was 40.

By the way, I wonder which category Kipling would go in? His best-known stories were written, and his name made, when he was in his 20’s—but some of his best work was done much later (On the Gate, for example).

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 12:06:26 +0000

I thought the story was that Barbara McClintock did great work from the start. It just took a long time for anyone to give her a real job.

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 09:08:26 +0000

Mary Midgley.

But not, I think, Helen Fielding, who had been working as a fairly successful feature writer for ten years at least before she started BJ as a column in the Independent when she was in her mid thirties. It so obviously described the poeple in the office then that I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read it.

By: lorenz

lorenz — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 07:02:47 +0000

Alice Munro.

By: antirealist

antirealist — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 05:52:45 +0000

Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career at the age of 60
+1, as I believe the cool kids say. Please let us not forget the wonderful “The Beginning Of Spring”.

Also, Mary Wesley.

By: tom s.

tom s. — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 05:12:59 +0000

Carol Shields