WTF is ‘women’s fiction’?!

Today's guest author contributor is Paddy O'Reilly. Paddy’s debut novel, The Factory, was listed among the best books of the year in 2007 in the Australian Book Review and the Sydney Morning Herald, and performed as the Radio National Book Reading in 2009. Her latest novel, The Fine Colour of Rust , was released earlier this year in Australia and the UK, and comes out in the USA on September 4. She'll be talking about various kinds of fiction at the Melbourne Writers Festival from August 25.

Paddy writes:

When Elizabeth Lhuede asked me to write about why I wouldn’t want my book classified as ‘women’s fiction,’ my first thought was that I don’t actually know what the classification ‘women’s fiction’ means. I know the publishing and bookselling industries use it for marketing. And yet having my work categorised that way would make me very uncomfortable indeed. It feels dismissive. It feels like being shunted off into the section of the bookshop set aside for trivialities. It feels, in fact, like a throwback term, something that would have been used in the time when a woman’s place was supposed to be in the kitchen, reading her lovely unthreatening ‘women’s fiction’ once the house had been made all spick and span and the scones were rising in the oven.

What is ‘women’s fiction’ anyway? Unlike crime or romance or SF, it isn’t a genre with identifiable characteristics and conventions.

           Is it writing for women?

           Is it writing about women?

           Is it writing by women?

I asked a few fellow writers for their thoughts about the term ‘women’s fiction’. Here’s what they said.

• My understanding is that men don’t read fiction much these days, but women still do. (Is that right?) In which case nearly all fiction is women’s fiction.
• If there’s any such thing, it’s fiction about a female protagonist, written by a woman, that women want to read (and possibly men, too). Apart from that, it could be any genre, any style and about anything at all. 
• ‘Writing by women’ is nice, ‘women’s fiction’ not - it has an unhelpful air of relegation in terms of readers or subject matter or level. 
• On reflection I think women’s fiction is an irritating term. We have fiction about women. We have fiction by women. These are just statements of fact (and fiction about women is not necessarily by women, and vice versa.) But women’s fiction... that’s not fact, that’s someone’s judgement call. (It will suit women, it’s about women’s issues - relationships, parenting, etc, as if men don’t take part in those parts of life.) And it’s way too broad. I hate books about shopping and dating. I love books that examine relationships and family. And both those types of books are called women’s fiction. More ghettoising. 
• Women readers do seek out ‘women’s fiction’, whatever that means to them. It doesn’t mean it has to be confined to any particular type of writing, though. (And women also seek out other things to read.) But others (critics, prize judges, lit editors, possibly even booksellers) think it means commercial fiction about domestic life or about relationships with men and family members – like that’s a bad thing. So it’s really not a very helpful term in any way. 
• If I think of women’s fiction at all it would be as an offshoot of popular fiction and would include Mills and Boon, superficial romances and novels involving much shopping for products with trendy names. I recall a genre called ‘sex and shopping’, definitely women only stuff. I imagine it’s a useful category for marketing and shelving books. Readers of literary fiction might use the term derisively to show how intelligent they are. 
• There is no such category as ‘Men’s Fiction’ that I know of in the mainstream, so that would indicate that ‘Women’s Fiction’ is used to corral, marginalise and fence off the work by women from the mainstream. Do women writers themselves refer to their colleagues’ work as ‘Women’s Fiction’ – I seriously doubt it – so the question remains who uses this term and for what purpose? In the same way good writing has no gender, it is just good writing, only the author has a gender, which should not reflect on the quality of the work. 
• I’d be asking someone who uses it what she means by ‘women’s fiction’ – it’s usually only used in a demeaning way in my opinion

Meg Wolitzer, an American writer, also has a few thoughts on the topic.

‘...any lumping together of disparate writers by gender or perceived female subject matter separates the women from the men. And it subtly keeps female writers from finding a coed audience, not to mention from entering the larger, more influential playing field. It’s done all the time, and not just by strangers at parties or by various booksellers that have no trouble calling interesting, complex novels by women “Women’s Fiction,” as if men should have nothing to do with them. A writer’s own publisher can be part of a process of effective segregation and vague if unintentional put-down. Look at some of the jackets of novels by women. Laundry hanging on a line. A little girl in a field of wildflowers. A pair of shoes on a beach. An empty swing on the porch of an old yellow house.

'Compare these with the typeface-only jacket of Chad Harbach’s novel, “The Art of Fielding,” or the jumbo lettering on “The Corrections.” Such covers, according to a book publicist I spoke to, tell the readers, “This book is an event.”’ (You can read Wolitzer’s entire article here)

How tempting it is to write a book and give it the title ‘Women’s Fiction’. Then, to introduce a little cognitive dissonance, the cover must have large imposing lettering, and no pictures.

Why does it seem like that book would be ironic?

Is The Getting of Wisdom anti-feminist? Virginia Lloyd thinks so.

While Miles Franklin tends to get a lot of attention because of the literary award, another prominent Australian who chose to publish under a male pseudonym may not be so well known. That author is Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson, better known as Henry Handel Richardson. Richardson, a talented musician, was born in East Melbourne in 1870, but moved with her mother to Europe in 1888 so she could study at the Leipzig Conservatorium. She published several books, including Maurice Guest and the trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

This year, The Henry Handel Richardson Society is running the Henry Handel Richardson Centenary Writing Competition to celebrate the ex-pat author's only return to Australia in 1912. (Entries don't close till August 31, so there's plenty of time to enter.) Here author, editor and agent, Virgina Lloyd, reviews another of Richardson's novels, The Getting of Wisdom.

Virginia Lloyd writes:
 

The Brooklyn Public Library, a brisk ten-minute walk from my apartment, holds one copy of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (1910). It is a Dial Press tie-in edition to the 1977 film adaptation. The cover features a still photograph of Sigrid Thornton as the central character, Laura Tweedle Rambotham.

As the library’s holdings of Australian fiction are sparse, I was surprised but glad to find a copy locally. I’m researching musically trained women writers – of whom there are many – and I needed to read it: Henry Handel Richardson was a gifted pianist whose family travelled to Leipzig, Germany, in 1888 so she could pursue her studies. Her experiences as a student there led her to write her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908). Happily The Getting of Wisdom, Richardson’s second novel, is not only shorter but also a far more enjoyable reading experience - at least for this reader.

The ghost of Jane Eyre’s school, Lowood, haunts the pages of The Getting of Wisdom, which is primarily a coming of age story told through Laura’s eyes. In the opening pages of the novel we see Laura clash with her mother and feel stifled by the cloying attention of her younger sister, who goes by the nickname Pin. Laura feels more than ready for boarding school but is shocked and disoriented by the factional behaviour of the other girls once she gets there. Richardson vividly draws Laura’s horribly awkward first day at school and her inept efforts at trying to make friends. As an outgoing but poor student whose mother works for a living - a secret Laura tries hard to keep - she fails repeatedly to fit in to a culture that rejects idiosyncrasy. Richardson writes: Laura “suffered …and it was suffering; for her schoolfellows were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which makes a woman’s cruelty so hard to bear.” Unfortunately most women have experienced just this sort of thing at one time or another. My own experiences of being ostracized at school made these passages spring brilliantly to life.

My biggest disappointment with reading this 1910 novel in 2012 was that it struck me as anti-feminist. This is not just about the pseudonym that Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson chose to wear like a coat throughout her writing life. As Germaine Greer points out in the introduction to the Dial edition, the tradition of the pseudonymous woman writer had been well established by the Bronte sisters and numerous others over the 19^th century. Richardson claimed that she wanted to test the assertion that had been in the press at the time about how easy it was to distinguish a woman’s writing from a man’s. (Didn’t we just go through this with V. S. Naipaul’s sexist comments about being able to detect a women’s work within a couple of paragraphs - to smell, as Francine Prose put it in Harper’s, the estrogen in the ink? Plus ça change... .) As Greer says, “Why Henry Handel Richardson should have assumed her more ponderous male mask is not so readily apparent” when compared with someone like Marian Evans (George Eliot), whose books’ moral high ground would have been eroded by the revelation of her “scandalous private life”.

I suspect that the male pseudonym was for Richardson a more complicated issue than she would admit even to herself. On reading The Getting of Wisdom, I could not help but feel that Richardson had a great deal of ambivalence about being a woman.

In one early scene, an exasperated visiting teacher accuses Laura’s friend Inez  of having “a real woman’s brain: vague, slippery, inexact, interested only in the personal aspect of a thing.  You can’t concentrate your thoughts, and, worst of all, you’ve no curiosity – about anything that really matters. … It makes me ashamed to belong the same sex.” This condemnation of an entire sex on the basis of one lazy student seems extreme if not pathological. In terms of the plot, however, the teacher’s criticism provides Laura with the motivation she has lacked to now. The narrator writes of Laura: “[S]he did not want to have a woman’s brain, thank you; not one of that sort; and she smarted for the whole class.” From that moment on Laura applies herself to her studies and makes dramatic progress in all subjects except arithmetic.

The most independent woman in the novel is Laura’s financially independent aunt, who makes her own living, lives by herself, and helps Laura to get into the school and to keep her there. But Richardson describes her as “an independent, manly person”, which is a curious and pointed choice of adjective.

The logic of the novel seems to suggest that Laura’s striking independence of thought and behavior reflects the conscious turning away from the humiliation of having a “woman’s brain”. Perhaps in Richardson’s mind this includes being preoccupied with men and marriage. Laura’s lack of interest in these subjects for most of the novel is a refreshing change not only from the obsessions of her peers, but from the subject matter of much fiction both then and now.

In Laura, Richardson gives us a wonderfully complex character. She is willful and intelligent, if not terribly smart. Her lack of shyness causes her to leap into situations she lives to regret, such as when she plays the piano for the headmistress, who condemns her afterward for her “shameless” physical performance and her choice of repertoire (Thalberg instead of Mozart). Laura is vain, lonely, vulnerable, and prone to lying to impress friends. The hole she digs for herself over her stay at the house of the married curate, in which she invents an elaborate story about their wild romance, is hilarious.

I also loved the way Richardson draws this novel to a close. The final third is masterfully controlled in pacing and character development. For any other latecomers to the work I will not spoil it here. It is enough to say that Richardson takes Laura on an emotionally challenging journey towards the end of her school days, and is not afraid to make her heroine suffer.

Germaine Greer contended that The Getting of Wisdom is Richardson’s “only great book, precisely because the subject is like the rest of us, ordinary, and therefore deeply important.” I think Laura Rambotham is a character well worth getting to know. The novel is fascinating reading, if only to provoke a reader to think about how much, and how little, changes in the lives of women.

Viginia Lloyd is a Sydney-born Australian literary agent, editor and freelance writer who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, was published in 2009 by Penguin and is available from a major international bookseller as an ebook.

 

"In defence of books written by women for women"

This week a Twitter discussion broke out as to whether romance, as a genre, is inherently feminist. The discussion was prompted by a review in which avid romance reader and blogger Kate Cuthbert took a respected romance author to task for not even considering her options when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.

On Twitter, Kate asked, "[W]hat obligations, if any, do romance novelists have to women's rights & feminism?" Aussie romance and erotica author, Keziah Hill, answered, "None, in the same way no novelist has an obligation to any social movement. However, novelists have to be prepared for readers to vote with their feet if idiots re social concerns." Hill followed this up with the statement that there is "nothing inherently feminist about romance".

The view that romance is inherently feminist is propounded by supporters of the genre; they regard the fact that romance is the one genre overwhelmingly written "for women, by women" as "proof" of its feminism. Yet, as Hill and others point out, the genre consistently fails to engage with issues of vital importance to many women, including, according to Hill, such issues as "Reproductive rights, the consequences of heterosexual hegemony" and the "power struggle with men over childcare and housework". Tweeter and blogger Kat (aka @BookThingo) remarked that the latter problem is often overcome in romance narrratives by having a hero rich enough to afford a housekeeper. Kat's comment was no doubt intended to be facetious, but what she says is right: wealth does equate with freedom from drudgery for many romance heroines, and love "earns" this freedom. That's the thing about romance: it's fantasy; it's aspirational, rather than realistic.  If it's going to be taken seriously, it has to be on other terms. But what other terms?

In what sense, if any, can it be considered "feminist"?

This question needs to be asked of romance precisely because the genre is so popular and written largely for woman and by women. It needs to be asked because the diversity of women's writing is often elided by its detractors, with few distinctions being made among different genres such as "romance", "chick lit" and "women's fiction", let alone more serious or ambitious writing by women. Writing by women is regarded (and often dismissed) as lightweight, domestic, focused on relationships, courtship, marriage and children. In addition, romance is particularly derided for supporting outdated and stereotypical gender roles. But as Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books blog was quick to point out in the Twitter conversation with Keziah Hill, examples can be found of romance writing which both support and subvert the hegemony [of patriarchy]. Romance now has many subgenres and reflects many different values. So why is it still so easily dismissed?

Caught up in this debate is the question of "popularity" versus "literary merit". One persistent assumption has been that romance is cheap and nasty, mass-produced and lacking in literary merit, as well as likely to propound pernicious reactionary values. Its popularity among women readers and writers is not deemed sufficient for it to merit serious attention. As Helen of AlltheNewsthatMatters blog asked rhetorically recently of pornography, "How do we judge the worthiness of a particular form of popular culture? Is the entertainment legitimate just because consumers are buying?" 

Fans of the genre are likely to counter this view with the claim that there are many examples of fine writing within the bounds of the genre, merit reflected in the awards regularly given out by associations such as Romance Writers of Australia and the Australian Romance Readers Association. So is there something else about romance that irks people?

Recently on the AWW blog, feminist publisher Susan Hawthorne discussed books "that make you think" and asked, "What else is writing about?" For many champions of romance, this question is key. For these readers and writers, romance is about the body, about emotions, about the visceral response of women's lived experience of love, lust and longing for connection. This is the aspect of romance which is dismissed.

But, if they're right, why? In what way are visceral depictions of women's bodies and emotions anathema to literary merit?

Today's guest blogger, award-winning fantasy author Louise Cusack, doesn't offer answers, but her post does draw our attention to the questions.

Louise Cusack writes: "In defence of books written by women for women"

The first time I heard Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe) described as a ‘romance genre writer’ I couldn’t help a quiver of “Damn right he is!”  I’d been sick of hearing about male authors writing love stories while female authors were said to have written romances, the inference being clear: love stories were important and life altering and powerful, while romances were more often described as frivolous and clichéd. 

Maybe this isn’t my argument to weigh into.  I am a published fantasy author after all – different genre – but I started my career trying to write romance and have stayed a member of Romance Writers of Australia for two decades.  I have a lot of friends there, some of whom are Harlequin Mills & Boon authors.  Thankfully the days of being slighted for writing “those silly little books” seems to be passing, which is just as well.  Romance Writers of America say on their website “More than a quarter of all books sold are romance. $1.36 billion in sales each year,” so I imagine those authors are laughing all the way to the bank, and caring less what their novels are categorised as by reviewers and critics.  Especially as the huge number of eReaders being purchased has created even more sales for romance publishers, with fans happily downloading novels so they don’t have to feel embarrassed about reading them on the train.

And there’s another problem.  I take issue with the fact that a woman should feel embarrassed to be seen reading a romance novel when no one blinks at a man reading a western or a crime thriller. What is it about women’s fiction that makes it less in the eyes of the literati, when as a genre it sells so much more?

Let me take you back a few years.  When I first started writing in the nineties I attended a “meet the authors” evening in Brisbane, hosted by the Queensland Writers Centre.  One of the speakers was an International best selling Mills & Boon author from the Gold Coast who’d written over thirty novels and had print runs in the hundreds of thousands, translated into several languages.  The other was a well respected Brisbane author of literary fiction whom I later found out had been given a print run of 500, many of which were still sitting in her garage.  That evening had a profound impact on me.  I’d grown up wanting to be a novelist, but I hadn’t given genre a thought.  That night I did think.  I realised I could either try for the approval of a marginal elite, which might get me into ‘the club’ and make awards and literary grants more likely.  Or I could write what I was convinced a great number of readers would love, and earn a living that way.  Of course there was no guarantee that I’d be good enough to get published in any form, but “commercial fiction” as my agent was later to call it, became my holy grail. 

To me, all books fit some genre, and Literary Fiction is just another genre beside Romance, Crime, Fantasy, Erotica and Young Adult.  Further, genre doesn’t dictate quality.  I’ve read some superlative fantasy (Kim Wilkins’ Giants of the Frost and The Autumn Castle are so achingly evocative they deserve to be Lit Fic) and I’ve also read some extremely boring literary fiction that wouldn’t have made it past the slush pile of a decent women’s fiction publishing house.

 

So why is there a literary cringe when women write and read stories that resonate with them emotionally?  Why should the intellectual experience of a story be considered more worthy?  These are all questions that deserve more considered answers than I have space for here, but as I see my fantasy romance trilogy, Shadow Through Time, digitally released this month by Pan Macmillan’s digital imprint Momentum Books, I don’t hope for the approval of critics or reviewers or government arts departments.  I care about readers.  I care about the women who are going to buy my story, who will hopefully thrill to the fantasy world I’ve created, who will be frightened, and saddened, and excited and delighted, and will ultimately fall head over heels for the champion who saves the princess’s life.  Because that’s what I dreamt of when I was reading Alice in Wonderland and Beauty and the Beast as a child, and I’ve never stopped wanting that emotional ride.

To those who would try and stifle or marginalise any form of women’s fiction, your days are numbered.  The eRevolution is making you redundant.  My readers don’t need your approval or your direction.  They’re getting their reviews from other readers on Goodreads and Amazon and Shelfari.  They’re deciding for themselves what’s ‘worthy’ and what’s not, and in this brave new world it’s not only publishers and agents who are wondering where they fit between reader and writer.

So while I started this blog with a dig at patronising attitudes, I’ll end it by proposing that those attitudes are far less relevant in a digital age.  Storytelling appears to have come full circle, and though our campfire is now called the Internet, its effect is the same.  Has the history of publishing reached a point where we simply let readers decide?  Perhaps their opinions and their economic power are ultimately all that counts.  What do you think?

Louise Cusack is an International award winning fantasy author whose best-selling Shadow through Time trilogy with Simon & Schuster Australia was selected by the Doubleday Book Club as their ‘Editors Choice’.  These novels have now been released as eBooks by Momentum Books.

Who reads "men's fiction"? (II: Do men and women write differently?)

Yesterday, Peter Karsten of Katoomba Book Exchange shared some thoughts on the question "Do men and women write differently?" Today author Caron Eastgate Dann gives a woman's perspective (unedited).

Eastgate Dann writes:

If you’d asked me the question “Is women’s writing different from men’s” in the 1990s, I would have told you I believed so, but I didn’t have any current information on this topic, because I hardly ever read any fiction by men.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to read novels written by women only, but something that evolved and took over my recreational reading habits almost as if by stealth. I don’t see it as discriminatory: after all, I’d spent a childhood reading through my father’s collection of books, top-heavy with thrillers by the likes of Wilbur Smith and Peter Benchley on the advice of teachers at my school when I did a reading test as a nine-year-old. “Don’t give her children’s books, she should be reading adult books,” they said. I’m not sure if the raunchy, bloodthirsty novel Jaws was quite what they had in mind, but oh well.

This was followed by an undergraduate degree in literature that emphasised the great British canon, mostly by men. Oh yes, there were your Austens, your Brontës, your (George) Elliot, but nothing unexpected. No discoveries, no long-lost or little-known masterpieces by underrated women writers. At the risk of being labeled a philistine by traditionalists, I have to admit that much of this canon I found unspeakably boring: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene that went on and on and on; Sir Walter Scott’s tedious tome Waverley of Scottish highland bleakness and war; and any of the many supercilious rants by Samuel Johnson. For some reason, I still have, from those student days, my copy of selected works by Johnson, and when I picked it up while writing this article, I turned to his The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. On the third page, I’ve written a word of marginalia: “bored”, it says.

I am not questioning the greatness of any of those writers, and I may feel different about them today. But as an 18-to-20-year-old female student in New Zealand, the British canon seemed to have little of relevance for me, though I did enjoy the Romantic poets. I liked American writers better: Mark Twain, Hemingway. We didn’t study a single Australian writer, by the way.

To break the monotony of that British canon, I also studied New Zealand literature and a wonderful subject about the 20th century novel that focused on writers in exile. While these subjects at least got away from the all-white middle-to-upper-class writers, our reading lists were still sadly lacking in writing by females. In NZ literature, I can remember studying Katherine Mansfield and Patricia Grace, but most of the others were men. In the 20th century novel subject, there were Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Kurt Vonnegut. But I can’t remember studying a single female writer. I can excuse studies of writing from previous centuries for being malecentric, because many more male writers were published in those days. But in the late 20th century, there was no excuse for women not making up 50% of any fiction reading list.

Anyhow, in the 1990s, I found myself purposely always selecting novels by women. I wanted to read authentic stories with strong female characters, realistic language and sensitively handled love scenes from a female point-of-view. I didn’t want to read about violence, torture, hunting or soldiers (even though I would go on to write about those things in my own novel). If I read a war story, I wanted it to be about what the women did, not the men. I wanted details of quotidian life in days gone by or in cultures different to my own.  I was a young woman shaping my own writerly identity and I needed role models, I see now.

By 1992, I was acknowledging to myself and others that I avoided novels written by men. This could be difficult. For four years during the 1990s, I lived in Thailand, and naturally, there weren’t as many English language book shops as back in Australia or New Zealand. The wonderful Asia Books shop on Sukhumvit Rd was a sanctuary for me, with thousands of English-language books, packed into four narrow storeys up rickety staircases. In the fiction department, the shop concentrated on blockbusters and novels written by local expatriates, so it could be a challenge to find something that was both literary and had a female author. I ended up reading a lot of mass-market fiction, but I’m not adverse to an easy, fast read, either.

One exception I remember from the 1990s was the Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1988. The first in the series, Palace Walk, is still in my bookcase (most of my other paperbacks from that time being long given away). First published in 1956 in Arabic, it was translated to English in 1990 and, interestingly, the English version was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.  I remember marveling at the sensitive way Mahfouz constructed his female characters. Indeed, Palace Walk begins with an atmospheric scene of a woman who wakes at midnight, as she has done all her long married life, to await her husband’s return “from his evening entertainment”, when she would have to serve him food and drink “until he went to sleep”.

I returned permanently to Australia in 1999, and around 2000, I set up a women’s book club in the small seaside community where I was based, which continued for about six years. I started to keep a book reading diary at this stage, and it’s interesting to look back on my reading habits. It reveals that in 2000 and 2001, only one in every 10 books I read was by a man. My book club members—who were all personal friends, as well—encouraged me to relax my stance and read some male writers as well. By 2002, about half the books I was reading were written by men.

At a meeting in 2004, a friend suggested I read A Special Relationship, by Douglas Kennedy. “It’s about postnatal depression,” she said enthusiastically, “But don’t let that put you off—it’s really good.” Now, not only did I have no children myself, but I had seen my mother go through post-natal depression after my brother was born, and I didn’t think I needed to read about it, too. However, I took the book from my friend and decided to give it a go. I was hooked. I was amazed that a writer could “get” a female character so well. I couldn’t put the book down, and at the end I knew I had been very wrong about male writers not being able to write female protagonists authentically.

The statistics, however, may be a little misleading. One of the reasons my records show that 50% of the books I read are by men, is due to one male writer: Alexander McCall Smith. Basically, I read everything he writes, more for his wonderfully quirky female characters than for the strength of the plots. Precious Ramotswe, the “traditionally built” hero of The No. One Ladies’ Detective Agency series, is one example.

People reacted with surprise when I used to tell them I read only female writers. Even women found my decision strange. Yet really, I was only doing what many men do: being sexist in my choice of reading material. 

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest men read mainly books written by men, while women read books written by men and women. It was the subject of a panel discussion in June, 2011 at the Women’s Word Literary Festival at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University: “Why Don’t Men Read Books By Women?”. And it’s widely reported that J. K. Rowling used initials rather than her first name, Joanne, because her publisher told her boys wouldn’t read books written by women. On its website, Esquire magazine has a list of “The 75 books every man must read”; only two are written by women (To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor).

There is also some research that supports this premise. In 2005, research into gendered reading habits was carried out by two British academics, Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins, of Queen Mary College in London. They interviewed 100 writers, academics and critics, asking them whether the last novel they read was by a woman or a man. Seventy-five per cent of the men named a male writer, whereas women were as likely to have read a book by a woman as a man. From this, they concluded that “Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men.” For more on the study, see “Women are still a closed book to men”, by David Smith of The Observer, May 29, 2005.

While I believe my decade focusing on women writers redressed the balance of my earlier years reading a traditional canon, I am happy today to say that I seem to have a gender balance in my personal reading choices. In fact, some of the best books I’ve read lately are by men: The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue, a retelling of the changeling legend and an examination of the link between mother and child, is a favourite. The biggest surprise for me was probably Jane Bites Back, by Michael Thomas Ford. Looking at the premise, it seems outrageously silly: Jane Austen becomes a vampire so is still alive in the 21st century and running a small bookshop in upstate New York; in swings Lord Byron, who is also a vampire and her former lover, and who is not to be trusted. However, it’s an incredibly witty read that really works. Neither of these fine male writers writes about traditionally ‘male’ subjects and I’m sure they’d be rarely included on lists of books men should read.

Three of my favourite Australian writers at the moment are all women and, I’ve just realised, all write historical novels and all have first names beginning with “K”: Kate Moreton for her unputdownable and beautifully worded historical sagas; Kate Grenville for her devastatingly tragic stories of colonial Australia; Kerry Greenwood for her sumptuous and rollicking Phryne Fisher series set in 1920s Melbourne. In fact, I’m trying to think of any male Australian writers I’ve read recently. OK, Alex Miller. Brilliant.  

 
Caron Eastgate Dann is a Melbourne writer, journalist and lecturer. She is the author of a novel, The Occidentals (under the name Caron Eastgate James), and a non-fiction book, Imagining Siam: A Traveller’s Literary Guide to Thailand. She has a PhD in literary studies and currently lectures in Print Cultures at the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. Previously, she was an entertainment industry journalist, working for Woman’s Day, the Sunday Herald Sun and TV Week, among others.


AWW writes:
Dr Eastgate Dann's books don't appear to be available from AWW supporting bookshops as ebooks (nor, in the ones checked, do they appear in their print catalogues available online). The following links are to Google, which will be launching the #aww2012 challenge to its Google+ circles for International Women's Day.

Imagining Siam
The Occidentals 

Another Aussie Bookshop which has recently joined the challenge is Foster's Little Bookshop in South Gippsland, Vic.

If you have any thoughts on this post or on the question of whether men and women write differently, please feel free to comment below.

PD James is a guy, right? (I: Do men and women write differently?)

This Thursday is International Women's Day. To raise awareness of The Stella Prize writers, readers and booksellers all around the country will be discussing the proposition: "Do women and men write differently?" This question was, in part, inspired by the widely-reported comments of VS Naipaul last June; Naipaul maintained that no female writer was his equal - not even Jane Austen - and he could tell within a paragraph or two the gender of the writer.

Recent statistics from VIDA, a women in the arts lobby group, show that gender bias in the representation of women in major literary magazines continued throughout 2011. Closer to home, over a year ago now, Sarah L'Estrange interviewed Susan Wyndham from the Sydney Morning Herald about its representation of women writers. Wyndham examined the previous six issues of the SMH literary pages and was horrified to discover the bias towards men (via publisher Sophia Whitfield's blog).

So what, if anything, has changed?

Not much, according to James Tierney, AWW participant and blogger, who conducted a two-month audit of substantial reviews in The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald from October 8 to December 3, 2011

Tierney writes: "More than a year after it became a matter for fresh controversy, less than a third (29%) of the books reviewed in the literary pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian each Saturday are written by women*. The gates were opened a little wider for XX reviewers, but not by a great deal (35%)."

Tierney goes on to ask: 

Why is this a problem? Surely the only thing that matters here is the literary quality of the works under review and, in the best judgement of the responsible editors, this is where the best work lay. 

Well, no. To accept that, I’d have to accept that the best work is generally done by men and that simply does not reflect my reading experience. 

Tierney makes the point that, if women are being overlooked for reviews based on something other than literary merit, the consequences are far-reaching.

I don’t know this for sure but I suspect that the literary review pages of our major newspapers determine -at least in part- the bookish agenda. This leads me to a truth so obvious that it almost doesn’t bare saying but let’s give it a go nonetheless: books that are reviewed well are more likely to be considered by literary judges for inclusion on prize lists, long & short.

If less than a third of books reviewed are by women, is it any wonder that our main literary prize, The Miles Franklin, has been awarded to women only twice since 2001? (Read Tierney's complete article here.)

So why are women under-represented in the pages of our literary journals and major media outlets? Is there something intrinsic to women's writing that makes it less worthy of critical attention?

A few weeks ago, I began canvassing opinions on The Stella Prize question in order to share those opinions on Thursday night when Kirsten Tranter hosts a panel at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba with fellow authors Tara Moss and Claire Corbett. I approached several eminent bookbloggers wondering whether they would be willing to write on the topic. Only one, Kim from Reading Matters, got back to me, saying she wasn't willing to go near that "hot potato".

A number of women I contacted agreed that men and women writing differently. One, an aspiring local travel/memoir writer, commented via Twitter that she almost never read books by women; her perception was that in her preferred genres (nonfiction and travel-memoir) women didn't publish much. When directed to The Guardian's quiz to see whether she could accurately determine if something was written by a woman, she reported 7/10 accuracy. She claimed women's writing tended to be "soft" and stood out. 

Could VS Naipaul right? Can we tell if something is written by a woman within a few paragraphs? Are being "soft" and/or "sentimental" common to female writers, characteristics anathema to our traditional aesthetic of what constitutes "quality"?

While posting flyers for the Stella event, I sought the opinion of a number of men, including a bookseller and an artist, both of whom answered, "Of course, men and women write differently," but that didn't mean they deserved less attention, they said. The artist went on to say that the situation with Fine Arts isn't so different: there are many examples of female artists, in his opinion, famous in their day, who are nevertheless now virtually forgotten except in relation to their more famous husbands or brothers. 

Peter Karsten from Katoomba Book Exchange had even more to say. He agreed to put down some rough thoughts on the topic for the AWW blog and have them published here (unedited).

Karsten writes: 
As I see it, women’s writing would be different from their male counterparts, insomuch as depending on the genre. That having been said, the genre would determine the difference and or the same writing style, influence, method and manner of the female author in question; as a woman could write with male and or female authority.


Thus it would be a skill needed in today’s society that will determine success or failure in reaching a targeted audience-whether it be male or female. The woman could use a male pseudonym to attract attention to her works, and gain a certain male following by subconscious suggestion that she is a male writer and or not use her full name.

As an example: J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, does not use her first name-Why? It is a subconscious effort to attract the male reader, (now as she is well known-her readership is male and female) but also a marketing ploy to some degree. Also of note are male writers, like P. D. James, who also don’t use their first name either. With these examples, there are many male and female writers who use their initials.

But is this deception necessary in today’s society - if it is a deception by the male and more importantly by the female author?

The answer is simply – NO – Why? The woman of today needs self-recognition of her efforts, and as her writing skills improve and her ability to deliver strong and authoritative word in written form expands, so to will she gain more recognition through efforts in her chosen genre.

For my own part and reading influence mainly in Science Fiction and Fantasy, I have actually found no difference in writing style, but there is a difference as the main character/s are female, not male, with male characters playing secondary roles. It’s as though there is a merging of styles in these genres; could it be that female writers are in their own way are developing a male form of writing in this so-called male dominated world, in order to compete for the slice of the financial pie?

As an example, male cooks bringing out cookery books, which in the past has been female dominated, we see this merging as this genre has both male and female authors, and there is no difference in presentation and or writing style.

So where does this leave the female writer in general? Is there a difference in the written word by female authors?

I said in the beginning, 'woman’s writing would be different', the word ‘would’ is the key; because it is up to the woman to determine the difference in writing style as apposed to a man’s.

All in all I personally am not worried about the so-called difference; communication is the key to understanding, and the written word has a power all on its own, whether written by a man or a woman, as long as we understand what is being written and or read….the word has no sex discrimination label.

The power of the pen is only as strong as the author wishes, and the success of that author is determined by public acceptance.

If there is a difference between male and female writing styles and skills…it is perspective, as this world needs perspective of both sexes, in order to relate and understand the world as we make it and perceive it though different eyes.

So the answer is simple… Perspective is the key…and through this viewpoint does the female writer achieve a perception that differs from their male counterparts.

AWW notes:
Before publishing, I contacted Peter Karsten about his mistaking PD James for a man. Karsten - being the very good sport he is - agreed to have his mistake stand uncorrected as it so well demonstrates his argument: that a woman may choose to write differently from men, but the way she writes isn't biologically determined; when she chooses to write using a unisex name in a genre dominated by men or which attracts male readers (such as crime), her gender is not immediately - or even over an entire oeuvre - obvious to the reader.

Female Australian writers who have chosen to publish under unisex gender neutral names recently include PA O'Reilly, PM Newton and Favel Parrett. (O'Reilly, whose book The Fine Colour of Rust has just been released, wrote a guest post for AWW yesterday.) In the reviews posted by booksellers throughout 2010-11, Newton and Parrett featured highly. In Parrett's case, her novel, Past The Shallows, also featured male protagonists and depicted settings associated with male-dominated activities such as fishing and surfing.

What do you think?