Review by Zandra Juarez
Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius By Kasia Van Schaik*
The premise of this book is that women simply can’t achieve the status of genius -mostly conferred to men- because of societal roles and limitations that go back millennia, and that in itself presents a challenge worth defiance in this day and age. Using personal and historical recollections through the world of art, Kasia Van Schaik poses some of the most intriguing questions I’ve recently read in a single piece of nonfiction:
Where are the women among monuments?
Why aren’t more of them?
What is a creative life?
What does such a life look like for women?
Where does the inner flint of artistic permission come from?
How is it ignited, and what is the oxygen that keeps it burning?
Are there female geniuses?
Can intelligence be feminine?
Who is the most genius woman?
*”The double standard persists” KVS
Who has time to be (or become) a genius nowadays? -was the question I kept asking myself while reading this book. I get it, the system is intended to persuade anyone from becoming a genius, especially women. Undoubtedly, a trailblazer for a new generation, in her memoir, Kasia Van Schaik reminds readers of what creativity requires to exist rather than merely survive. Throughout its pages, the author recalls female artists’ heritage of solitude and constraint, from Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro, Gertrude Stein to Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin to Louise Glück, Mary Wollstonecraft to Elena Ferrante, Julia Kristeva to Clarice Lispector, in a lyrical and almost meditative style that challenges reflection, questions tradition, and encourages permission to pursue genius as much as narrative and gender role re-definition.
The book starts with the inconclusive story of a recent proposal for “a notable historical woman to join the effigies of notable historical men” in the town square of Padua, Italy. Women Among Monuments is a reclamation of women writers’ lineage. One’s lineage is not only fraternal or sanguine. It has nothing to do with family bonds or physical proximity, yet it has everything to do with those women who have helped us shape an ideal of our own artistic achievements as a real possibility, not as wishful thinking.
*Kasia Van Schaik holds a PhD in English Literature from McGill University. She is the author of the linked story collection We Have Never Lived On Earth, which was long-listed for the Giller Prize. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, the LA Review of Books, the Best Canadian Poetry, and CBC.
Women Among Monuments was released on February 17th, 2026 (Dundurn Press).
Zandra Juarez is a Guelph-based writer, literary critic and cultural community program curator.
