Laura Miller, inspired by Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers, recently took up the “horribly fraught” question of whether women writers get their fair share of respect. Miller’s piece makes for an interesting companion to Jennifer Szalai’s review of Zoë Heller’s The Believers (above). On the one hand, Miller argues that women writers — with one or two notable exceptions — don’t feel as comfortable (or as entitled) as men do to attempt Great American Novels, the kind of all-you-can-eat buffets that Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, and the late David Foster Wallace have produced. Szalai argues, in part, that some writers are simply more adept at smaller canvases, but that critics often overlook quality for quantity. It can be difficult to explain, without being dry, why a modestly plotted 250-page novel is affecting. It’s much easier to scream: It’s about war! And painkillers! And subdivisions! It’s 3,000 pages long!

I was struck by the American-British divide. Miller writes that British women are “perfectly at home with the capacious novel of ideas,” citing Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing, and notes that “George Eliot practically invented the thing.” From Eliot to Zadie Smith, there’s a rich tradition of women writing “big” fiction in the UK. This is not to say America lacks strong women writers. But take a sample of them: Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Marilynne Robinson, and Lorrie Moore. Three of those writers primarily produce (or produced) short stories. The fourth, Robinson, writes meticulous novels that are the opposite of bloated. It does feel like there’s an imbalance of scale. Miller makes a good case for why women wouldn’t have written much literature during America’s frontier days, so perhaps it’s just our relative youth skewing the overall picture.