Last week, the shortlist for the 2024 Booker Prize was announced and it was a "gratifying, thrilling" moment, as one of the jurors had said. Five of the six shortlisted authors are women. This is a first in the 55 years of Booker history. As we cherish this moment, it is imperative to remind ourselves of the building blocks of an era when this is possible. To think of a time in history when a door was opened for the "second sex" by her countless ancestors who found overt and covert ways to assert themselves.

The themes in the shortlisted books encompass queer romance, thriller fiction, collective memory, and perspective shift, among other things. As a recent HT editorial mentioned, the world has come a long way from when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she described the life of William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith, a gifted but discouraged writer who eventually kills herself.

Woolf imagines Judith in an age of literary supremacy, the Elizabethan era, when a man regarded as one of the greatest writers in the world, Shakespeare, flourished. It was a time when women were compared to the working class and Woolf puts this succinctly: "It is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people."

Indeed, creativity is a privilege and art a luxury. An Emily Bronte here or a Mary Ann Evans there would break free once in a while but by and large, the genius remained inaccessible for the oppressed because survival was a priority. If she did get caught writing, or rather trespassing beyond conformities, she was deemed a witch, possessed by the devil, or simply mad. Woolf even said that the countless anonymous writers could easily be women.

Among all creativities, writing has remained central to an expression that outshines everything else because it relies on language. Language requires no separate devotion of time to be acquired as a skill. It is learnt in everyday communications and interactions. But here is the caveat in allowing women to write — it is not any language they would write in but the language of their lived experiences. A life of suppression, repression, and coercion.

Once the printed word makes its way into the world, it becomes immortal. To allow women to write and use language according to their whims was a dangerous predicament. What if the "word" gets out that the society is patriarchal and unkind? What if this reaches the others, and there is a revolution?

For centuries, women picked monikers and pseudonyms to evoke communication. The Bronte sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne —became Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell: identities they kept under the rug to avoid controversies and speak their truths. Victorian author Mary Ann Evans, who wrote The Mill on the Floss (1860) took the name George Eliot to ensure that her work was “taken seriously”. The intentions of these authors transcended mercenary pursuits of glory to become symbols of cracks in the wall.

Today, the number of women authors is infinite. Some even wish to distance themselves from being associated with the word "feminism" because it is too "radical". Regardless, the burden of feminism and feminist writing is one society will carry on simply because writing cannot unburden itself from a continuing battle for agency. This burden has dismantled literary gatekeeping and to quote Woolf again, we might stumble upon "a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to".