I'm curious if there's anyone else here who doesn't care much for Tolkien. I mean - he was a visionary, he created a wonderful, incredibly detailed world and history and people and language and all, but the writing to me is boring, flat and very dated. (Besides there being almost no women in it at all.) When people rave about LOTR I tend to say I'd love it if only he'd found a better writer I wonder if it's because I read a lot of other fantasy before reading Tolkine, so by the time I got to reading "the original", as it were, it sounded like a cliche.

My earliest and strongest fantasy reading experience was the Narnia books. I still love them

Dan Simmons' Hyperion books are also very good. But very different, a bit unsettling in their horror approach.

Pardon me for semi-hijacking the thread away from women in fantasy. I just don't get to talk about my favourite genre very much!