Female Writers Get Their Due : Books: An exhaustive guide lists 500 titles, all by women. And it’s global: 70 nations are represented.

When Harold Bloom’s name comes up, Erica Bauermeister smiles to herself a little ruefully, like someone who knows she should keep her mouth shut and knows perfectly well she won’t.

Bloom is the venerable Yale professor and recent author of “The Western Canon,” an exhaustive and oh-so-authoritative recitation of the 26 greatest authors in the history of Western Civilization, nearly all of whom happen to be white men.

Bauermeister is a 35-year-old teacher at Antioch University in Seattle and recent co-author of “500 Great Books by Women,” an exhaustive and decidedly non-authoritative reader’s guide to writings by women from around the world.

Bloom is the staunch defender of Academic Tradition and acerbic critic of multiculturalism.

Bauermeister?

“I’m Harold Bloom’s walking nightmare,” she says.

In “500 Great Books by Women,” published by Viking Penguin in December, Bauermeister and co-authors Holly Smith and Jesse Larsen present concise summaries of works by women from every continent except Antarctica, organized in themes ranging from art to ethics to family to war.

All of the icons of women’s literature are duly represented, but Jane Austen’s “Emma” is accorded no more space than “Efuru,” a novel by Nigerian writer Flora Nwapa. And while Bloom’s “Canon” soberly ranks Shakespeare at the pinnacle of literature and rates everyone by how well they measure up, the works in “500 Great Books by Women” aren’t ranked at all.

“We wanted to do away with the idea that ‘greatness’ was something exclusive, accorded to only a few books that somebody else decided were ‘great,’ ” Bauermeister says. “We wanted this to be something inclusive.”

Indeed, even avid readers may be astonished at the breadth of works presented by Bauermeister, Smith and Larsen, who spent three years researching the book. Half of all the titles are from outside the United States; 70 nations are represented.

“Confessions of Lady Nijo,” a diary of a Japanese imperial court concubine who became a Buddhist nun, dates from the 13th Century; “Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot,” a collection of essays by African American author Pearl Cleage, is less than two years old.

The works range from the seminal, such as Rachel Carson’s clarion call for environmentalism, “Silent Spring,” to the autobiographical, such as Isabella Bird’s “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.” Bird left England in 1954 to seek a cure for her poor health, and wound up traveling alone for six months on horseback through the Rockies. Sometimes, as she composed the letters to her sister that comprise this volume, the ink would freeze in her quill.

Only a quick perusal of “500 Great Books by Women” is needed to get the idea: “Women write in every way that you can imagine,” Bauermeister says. “They write about every subject and in every style that men do.”

And they always have, though their contributions are rarely canonized.

Bauermeister said the idea for the guide arose from her indignation at the way college literature courses had, quite literally, marginalized women writers.

She was taking a course on the American Renaissance (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, etc.) at the University of Washington when she came across a footnote in a textbook, which casually mentioned that hundreds of American women had written in the 19th Century.

That was all.

“I was floored,” Bauermeister says. “A footnote! I was about to start my dissertation and never knew these people existed. I was so angry no one had told me about these writers, no one had told me that I had this heritage.”

From that slender thread, Bauermeister discovered a rich fabric of literature that had its own traditions, structures and myths. As she read, anger gave way to love and a sense of pride for those who had gone before her. This passion, Bauermeister says, is what eventually compelled her to share the discovery with others.

After pitching the idea for a readers’ guide to an interested publisher, she enlisted Smith, 42, a voracious reader who manages a bookstore in Seattle, and Larsen, a self-described working-class artist and author who, at 50, had just gone back to school to get her a degree in writing.

None of the three women had ever written a book. They immediately agreed on the kind of book they didn’t want to do.

“All of us agreed we didn’t want to write about books we didn’t love,” Larsen said. “We didn’t want to make it an academic, pooh-pooh kind of thing.”

They divided the world into more or less equal geographic chunks and hunkered down for some serious reading.

“The hardest thing was to say I’m going to trust that Holly and Jesse will pick great books,” Bauermeister says. “There was no physical way any one of us could have done it alone.”

Even the writers they all knew would make the final cut presented challenges. “We knew we wanted Alice Walker, but which Alice Walker?” Smith said.

In the end, with few arguments, a lot of mutual trust and the help of some 30 contributors, the 500 were chosen. (Top secret: There are actually 515 entries in the guide. But who’s counting--eh, Mr. Bloom?)

A sense of celebration comes through in the light, swift prose of the synopses and the introductions that begin each themed chapter. Listen to this introduction to “Places and Homes”:

A piece of land, a mountain, a river--all can exist without a human presence. People have rarely had this capacity for separation, however. Wherever they are, they send out their tendrils of associations, memories, needs and questions, intertwining themselves into the landscape, making it a home.

“I was surprised at how may people have told me they enjoyed reading it just as a book, and read it straight through from Art to Works,” says Smith. “There aren’t many reference books I feel that way about.”

Smith, whom Bauermeister calls “the most natural researcher I’ve ever seen,” said even though she considered herself well-read before taking on this project, she was shocked by the quantity and quality of the work they found.

“In going through books of Asia, I read ‘Requiem’ by (Japanese writer) Shizuko Go,” Smith said. “It’s the story of two girls, 14 and 16 years old, and their experiences in Japan near the end of World War II. It is the most devastating, moving book about war that I have ever read. When I had finished, I thought, ‘Why didn’t I know about this book? What is wrong with this picture?’

“People, both men and women, need these voices.”

All of the books in the guide were available in the United States at the time of publication, though some now may be out of print.

“That was one of the hardest things about doing this. There are incredible authors in Africa, for example, but only about one out of 10 of them are in print in the United States,” Bauermeister says. “We’ve probably lost six to 10 books just since last year.”

The guide is now in its third printing. The authors hope the book, which fits easily into a (large) pocket, will serve the dual purpose of bookstore companion and classroom reference.

In her classes, Bauermeister says: “Students have realized that women around the world were talking about similar issues, and they could identify with a working-class woman in France and a teen-ager in Nigeria.

“We do students a great disservice by giving them narrow conceptions of what is great,” she says. “You can learn so much, even from a bad book. We never show anyone Yeats’ early poetry because it was absolutely awful. But I think that could be so instructive to someone trying to teach themselves the craft.

“Reading is one of the most subjective things we do. It was difficult for me as a woman to read Henry James and Norman Mailer in the context of objective ‘greatness.’

“I’m not saying that Bloom’s top books are not great. I’m just saying, ‘Look at what you’ve been missing.’ ”