Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.

That line is from Virginia Woolf's 1939 novel The Years, which I am not presently reading but which I've been thinking about intermittently for the past several days. It's been lying on my desk among the other splayed-open books that I've been working among--Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Wordsworth's Prelude, Bolton's Last Nostalgia, Melville's Moby-Dick, Ford's The Sportswriter, Roget's Thesaurus. "What a crew of white men," as stalwart observers of disparity might declare. Typically, though, I hadn't really noticed that till now.

I'm never sure if my reading patterns make me complicit in my own oppression or able to override it. But have you read the Vida statistics about the male-female publication ratio? They have been infiltrating the news lately, with responses from all over the literary map--including one extraordinarily rude one from Peter Stothard of the Times Literary Supplement. They are disheartening but not surprising, and certainly fit with what more than one publisher has told me to my face: that my writing has too feminine a flavor. This despite the desk covered with the works of famous white men.

My first response to such a remark is to feel guilty, not angry. My second response is obliviousness: to go back to reading the books I was reading anyway and to write about whatever I feel like writing about. I really don't know what else to do.