I never questioned the literature I read in my high school English classes. I respected it, I appreciated it (so much as a teenage girl can appreciate stories written by dead white men with primarily male characters at their center), but I never questioned it. There was, I assumed, a reason those particular pieces had been chosen; that the knowledge I would obtain from the study of them would provide the greatest benefit to my education both as a reader and writer and as a member of society. This is, after all, why we read novels.

I wondered, of course, at the shocking lack of female authors in the curriculum when there were plenty in the classical literary canon, but I never questioned the wisdom of my teachers for excluding them. I was a very different person then. Needless to say, I pissed off far fewer people than I do today and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.