By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Who are the funniest female authors – whether poets, novelists, or writers of short fiction or non-fiction – in the English language? Reducing the number to just ten names is going to be a challenge, but here’s our essential pick of the funniest female voices in English (or English-language, more accurately) writing.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle pays homage to the master of English comic fiction
Saki’s short stories have everything going for them. For one, they’re short: a few years before Virginia Woolf penned her series of very short sketches about modern life, such as ‘A Haunted House’, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, and ‘Kew Gardens’, Saki – no modernist, but decidedly modern – had reduced the short story form to three pages which contained everything the story needed to contain, with no filler but more wit per page than just about any other English writer, with the possible exception of P. G. Wodehouse (who must have been influenced by Saki).