So, The Guardian has an interesting article today about forgotten writers. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/10/literary-reputations-zero-hero-dj-taylor

Being
me, I am of course certain that I will be forgotten myself (without
having ever reached the heights of minor recognition, let alone 'hero')
apart perhaps for some of my academic pieces. And that's fine with me,
too. Also being me, I've read at least 3 of the 'forgotten' writers
mentioned here (Morgan, Dreiser, Wilson) and heard of all the others
apart from Mary Mann. But I'm not typical, I suspect (I have a widely
-read mother and I have been known to read historical literary criticism
for fun and then tracked down the books.)
The article focuses on
'literary' writers. There are names it doesn't mention -- Rosamund
Lehman, John Fowles, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen -- which I hope
means people are still assumed to be reading them. There are, of course,
far more 'forgotten' genre writers who were huge in their time --
Weyman, Sabatini, even Michael Innes, who was A N Wilson under a
pseudonym.
As the article shows in the case of Virigina Woolf,
writers can go out of fashion and be rediscovered, or indeed rescued
from obscurity entirely. Dumas has never stopped being read or being in
print but he has only begun to be accepted by the literary establishment
as more than just a 'popular' writer in the last quarter century or so.
On the flip side, Dickens was canonised almost at once, despite his
popularity, and remains so despite the problems of misogyny, classism
and sentimentality in is work. (I do not like Dickens. If I'm going to
read social realism of that period, I'll take Balzac and Dostoyevsky.)
Who
are your favourite forgotten writers? And who do you predict may be the
writers canonised into fame by later generations? I'd like to see a
rise in the recognition of Anne Bronte over her sisters, of Emily Eden,
Rosamund Lehman and Rumer Godden. And, moving closer to now, Patricia
Geary, Pat Murphy, Tanith Lee (who really belongs up there with Angela
Carter already), Justina Robson, Judith Tarr and Zenna Henderson.