I’ve just read On Gender and Writing , a selection of essays edited by Michelene Wandor published in 1983. It was a fascinating look back at the 1980s, the era of Spare Rib , of the Gay Liberation Front, of earnest fiddling with language to incorporate male and female – the awkward “he or she” and “s/he”. The book (discovered in an Amnesty International bookshop) even smells of the 80s with its aroma of yellowing pages and bleached cover. One essay in particular struck me: An Excerpt From My Unpublished Writing by Nora Bartlett. In this essay, Bartlett describes how when she started writing she had no idea that she would remain unpublished: “I didn’t set out to become an unpublished writer, it just happened”. Writing her first novel, she never even thought about being published – because it didn’t occur to her that she would not be. This was not because she had a huge ego or a sense of entitlement: you only have to read her essay to be certain of that. She genuinely believed ...