Some of the best writers in English are women. My personal list would include:

• Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey)
• Agatha Christie (Poirot)
• Jane Austen (the perils of managing to snag a husband)
• U. K. LeGuin (The Earthsea Trilogy)
• Lois McMaster Bujold (Lord Miles Vorkosigan

Of those, one wrote science fiction of ideas: Le Guin. Bujold writes romantic space opera — Cordelia Naismith is one of the best SF characters in a series. And all but Le Guin have a very clear sense of the domestic in their books. Houses are described, and the inner life of ordinary people mentioned.

Sarah Hoyt, who is getting close to being on that list, comments

I read Agatha Christie the same way I read Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner, and way too many others I can’t now remember, until I came to the states and discovered Ellis Peters and a dozen others. I never paid any particular attention, I’ll be honest, to whether my writer was male or female. Oh, sure, there was a flavor. I can’t imagine Agatha Christie being written by a man unless he were PROFOUNDLY gay and lived the sort of life gay guys sometimes lived in English villages at the turn of the century. Her novels like the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton are intensely feminine in a difficult-to-pin way. I think this is why the bien pensant, particularly leftist ones hate her. They want to extol females, but only females who behave like men, and she is the antithesis of that. It is easy to see from her thrillers (my LORD they were bad) that she didn’t really “get” international politics or world affairs at the visceral level some of us do. They just didn’t matter to her. However, whatever the critics say, she had an unerring eye for the “private wound” and the private motive, too. She knew what made normal people, living normal, daily lives tick. I often find myself telling my husband “As Agatha Christie would say” about something one of our friends or acquaintances did. I think this makes the intelligentsia uncomfortable too. So many of them are so small in their private lives, if you know what I mean.

This voice is not that of men. The men I like: Vox (much better that GRR Martin), John Wright, Eric Flint, Michael Williamson, Orson Scott Card, Ken McLeod, Charles Stross Neal Stephensen…[1] and the giants they stand on, Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton… do not write domestic books. Or write them badly. David Weber’s Honorverse (and yes, I like Weber) falls apart when Honor gets married and he has to describe the home.

He’s clumsy where Christie would be accurate. But then, Christie can’t write space battles.

Women write best when they write about what truly interests them, which is interpersonal relationships. But shoe-horning a woman’s novel into a science fiction, or fantasy, or worse, military science fiction skin is not only uninteresting, it’s quite often downright cringe-worthy.

The problem, as I see it, is that most female writers are too solipsistic to be interested in ideas beyond pushing the current Narrative. It’s too bad, because they are vastly superior in their understanding of socio-sexual relations than are their gamma male counterparts in the SF/F genre. At the very least, women writers understand that men pursue women and that women are attracted to men for reasons that have nothing to do with how assiduously he respects her and avoids expressing any undue interest in her. (I can reliably ID a male writer’s socio-sexual status by how he describes male-female relations, and most male writers in SF/F are gammas.)

But at the end of the day, I don’t give a damn about whether the author’s Mary Sue protagonist goes for Alpha Male 1 or Alpha Male 2, which is the central question around which most female-written fiction revolves. This may explain why, when I look at the female authors I like reading, I notice that they almost uniformly utilize male protagonists.

Ellis Peters – Brother Cadfael. Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot and the famously celibate Miss Marple. Susan Cooper – Will Stanton. Tanith Lee utilizes a broad range of protagonists, but most of them are male. Even Lady Murasaki’s classic novel revolved around Hikaru Genji, the shining prince.

Now, there are no doubt exceptions to be found, but as a general rule, name a woman author with a female protagonist and you can be fairly certain that regardless of what else might be going on in the book, a significant percentage of the text will be devoted to answering one of two questions: a) will she or won’t she? and b) Alpha Male 1 or Alpha Male 2?

If that interests you, fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But I, for one, am not very likely to read it. A great book is a great book, and it doesn’t matter who writes it, but women writers should keep in mind that many readers have been burned many times by other women writers who have attempted to sell them a romance in non-romance wrapping.

Play the reader dishonestly that way and he – or she – will never give you another chance.

Good female writers are not the straw women Vox is setting us as a rhetorical device. They don’t write Mary Sues but women. Consider the heroines of the Austen world. Emma is vain and at times callous. Miss Beckett is a prig. And the Dashwoods are forced to the margins of life for a gentlewoman. Good writers write in three dimensions: not all the women in the world of a good writer are saints, and not all men cads.

And they accept that sometimes the role of a woman is to sit. And wait. And worry. Because her husband is away. That is part of the feminine voice. And it is missing in this pale and insipid age.

1. I would add the cyberpunks, Spider Robinson, and Harlan Ellison. I don’t like Heinlein apart from the juveniles, and I don’t particularly like Asimov and the “Golden Age” — they have dated, in a way Wells and the yellow trash novels of the Edwardian period have not.