Yes, this is completely true. I really dislike linking to a series of tweets as I think Twitter is a terrible platform, but this time I’ll make an exception. And for brevity and non-annoyance I’ll combine some tweets, but keep the formatting.

in the 1800s “british lit” basically did not exist outside of poetry because so many novelists were women and so you can find these old screeds written by male academics of the time dismissing “that most perfidious and immaterial of things, *the novel*”

50 years before british intellectuals made Shakespeare their Homer they were calling his plays trash because women liked to go to them

the hunger games books are exceptionally good examinations of the healing and harming powers of ritual, regionalism, cyclical oppression but it will be about 25 years before someone with cachet in the lit crit field “discovers” that,  because they’re “aimed at young women”

people trash her prose because they assume its quirks and occasional awkwardness are products of inexperience, not intention

Exactly. The prose is awkward in places because those are Katniss’s thoughts. Katniss is sixteen years old. I’ve read other works by Suzanne Collins and the prose is much much (vastly!) different.

There is a reason for that. She is a pro, not some amateur pounding away fecklessly.

And just like much that was seen as “trash” is now “grand, dignified literature that no one dare question,” I think The Hunger Games books (though probably not the movies) will stand the test of time.

Collins’ prose is deliberate; I recognized the literary techniques she was employing because I care about such things, but they are subtle so I was not surprised more didn’t notice.

I was however astounded that people who should’ve noticed did not. Bias does strange things to people’s brains.