Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius by Kasia Van Schaik

Review by Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson is a book reviewer and author of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road (University of Regina Press, 2025). His second book, Walking Well, will appear in 2026. Read his writing at Readingandwalking.com. Ken is a settler who grew up in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario. He lives on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan), where he is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. Read Ken's author Q&A, or listen to his audio essay about writing Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road.

Find the publisher's description of Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius by Kasia Van Schaik, (Dundurn, 2026; $25.99) beneath Ken's review.

Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius by Kasia Van Schaik

The cover of Women Among Mounuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius by Kasia Van Schaik

Kasia Van Schaik’s new book, Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius, begins in 2022, with a story about a proposed monument in Padua, Italy. Two city councillors suggested that a statue of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in the world to earn a Ph.D., a feat she accomplished in 1678, be installed on one of the empty pedestals in Padua’s town square, the Prato della Valle. All of the other statues in the square—and there are many—represent famous men: artists, scientists. Piscopia would’ve been the only woman included.

The pedestal problem: why women are missing from our squares

You’d think that idea would’ve been welcomed, that recognizing Piscopia’s achievement would’ve been recognized as a long overdue gesture towards including half the planet’s population in the panoply of genius on display in the Prato della Valle. And if so, you’d be wrong. Critics all over Italy condemned the idea. Including one woman among all those historical men was simply “cancel culture” in action. The acrimonious debate, Van Schaik tells us, exposed “the historical resistance to simply recognizing women’s achievements,” a resistance that isn’t only present in Italy. As she walked around Montreal, the city where she lived at the time, she noticed that all of the statues of actual people in that city’s squares and parks and boulevards were of men. Women were present only in allegorical representations of virtues, as goddesses or angels, not as individuals who had accomplished something worth celebrating.

From solitude to permission: the internal architecture of genius

The story of Piscopia’s proposed statue (approved by city council, but not yet installed in the square three years later) becomes an emblem of the argument Van Schaik makes in this thorough, convincing book. Our patriarchal society still cannot bring itself to celebrate the achievements of women or even recognize the existence of women who are geniuses. “Where are the women among monuments?” she asks, echoing Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. “Why aren’t there more of them?” Like Woolf, Van Schaik recognizes that material considerations—a space in which to work and an income—have made it difficult for women to engage in intellectual and creative pursuits. However, she notes, also following Woolf, women need freedom, from self-doubt and self-censorship, to become artists and intellectuals. They need the permission that is typically granted to men. Women Among Monuments sets out to look at “the long-standing refusal to recognize women among monuments by looking at women writers’ and artists’ past and present relationships to solitude, self-permission, and ambition,” Van Schaik writes: in other words, what is necessary for “historically marginalized individuals” to have “a chance at a creative life.”

Braiding the personal and the political: a masterclass in the essay form

I thought this book was simply excellent. As I read, I learned more about artists and writers I knew a little about (Georgia O’Keeffe, Gertrude Stein, Mary Wollstonecraft, Kate Chopin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Munro) and others of which I was unaware (Ana Mendieta, Josephine Nivison, Bernadette Mayer, Helen Martins). I discovered the term “art monster” (I knew the type but had no word to describe it). But Women Among Monuments isn’t a research-heavy, academic slog. Far from it. I’m a sucker for braided essays, the kind of writing that brings together personal experience and information about the world in order to, as the Canadian writer Jenna Butler explains, allow us “to draw close facts that are external to ourselves and to bring them more clearly into view,” and by adding a personal story to those facts, “make them more permeable, less abstract.” Each chapter of Women Among Monuments could be considered a braided essay; in fact, the entire book could be described that way. The result, as Butler argues, is to make Van Schaik’s argument less abstract. The shifts from the stories of other women to stories of Van Schaik’s life (returning to her native South Africa to visit her grandmother, working as a nanny in Berlin, participating in an artists’ residency at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island) are deft; the writing in both is vivid and compelling. No surprise: her fiction was shortlisted for major awards, and her poetry chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, won the Mona Adilman Prize.

The issue Van Schaik examines in this book—how “historically marginalized individuals” can engage in creative or intellectual work—leads, as she points out, to broader questions: How do people find “the inner flint of artistic permission”? What does the creative life look like? Her focus is on how such questions relate to women, but we might use Women Among Monuments to think about other people from other marginalized groups: people who are racialized, working class, or rural. (I’d be remiss here if I didn’t give a shout out to Tanis MacDonald’s 2018 book Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City in relation to a consideration of writers from rural and working-class backgrounds.) Those of us who aren’t part of a marginalized community, like me, may also see ourselves reflected in Women Among Monuments. For instance, I recognize my experience in Woolf’s argument that a writer needs a place to write, enough money to have the time to write, and a sense of being allowed to write, because I’m typing this review in an office that will disappear when my current teaching contract ends, and because it took decades before I felt that I had permission to take my writing seriously. Even someone like me, despite my privilege, can relate to the struggles Van Schaik describes. Perhaps that’s why I connect with this book so much.

I have just one complaint: it would’ve been nice to see, perhaps in a footnote, a reference to the fact that the City of Toronto rescued the properties that belonged to Artscape after its bankruptcy, and that artists’ residencies are happening again at Gibraltar Point. Perhaps it was too late to make that addition to the manuscript when the news broke. It would be a shame if readers came away from this book with the wrong impression.

But that’s it. Women Among Monuments is absolutely worth reading. In fact, I look forward to reading it again.

Description of Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius by Kasia Van Schaik (Dundurn, 2026; $25.99)

"A lyrical meditation on the enduring obstacles women artists and writers face in a world still unaccustomed to recognizing female genius. What does it take for a woman to don the mantle of genius — a title long reserved for male artists? From her studies in Montreal to a dead-end job in Berlin, a midnight tour of Paris, a bankrupt art residency on the Toronto Islands, and a mysterious sculpture garden in the Karoo desert, South African—Canadian author and professor Kasia Van Schaik considers what it means for a young woman to call herself an artist and claim a creative life. Drawing on a diverse web of literary and cultural sources and artistic icons — from Georgia O’Keeffe to Ana Mendieta, Gertrude Stein to Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Marmon Silko to Bernadette Mayer — Women Among Monuments asks, What, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for female genius? Where does the inner flint of artistic permission come from? What is the oxygen that keeps it burning? In her memoir interwoven with incisive biographies of female solitude, constraint, and perseverance, Van Schaik blazes a trail for more inclusive artmaking practices, communities, and monuments."