I adore (adore, I tell you!) the stories of Alice Munro, as anybody who's looked at my bookshelves can attest, and I adore (adore, I tell you again!) the stories of Anton Chekhov, who actually takes up considerably more space on my shelves, but that's just because he wrote hundreds of stories, a bunch of plays, and all in Russian, which means, of course, that I absolutely must own every possible translation just to be able to compare.
Anyway, I discovered (via Scott) that Ruth
Sorry, I'm being deeply unfair in reductio-ing Gordon's ad for absurdum. There are lots of things I could say about Gordon's premises about gender and writing, about characters and writers, about seeing what you want to see, or about Chekhov's complicated attitudes toward and relationships with women, but I'm really only in the mood to be facetious. I haven't read any of Munro's or Chekhov's stories for a little while now, so I'm going to go back to them. Maybe I'll start with this book: