The Gender Divide

The only way to truly narrow the gender divide in literature is for female novelists to write some great books, says Lionel Shriver in the Independent.

From the piece...

As I have observed before, what critics don't do with female authors is flop down and face east, blubbering and feet-kissing and throwing around extravagant if shopworn designations like "the Great American Novel", creating the sort of hoo-ha that recently surrounded Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. (By the way, I finally figured it out. "Great American Novel" = "doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man." That is actually what the expression means. So naturally it is never, and can never, be applied to works by women.) Thus the very top cultural tier in literature is rarely penetrated by female authors.

Yet let's get into a more awkward and thus more interesting area. I am often asked at festivals what writers I admire, or which novelists helped to inspire my choice of vocation. If I don't simply draw a blank (I can never seem to remember having read a single book in my life, under the gun), I grab a few of the following names: Richard Yates, Ian McEwan, Matthew Kneale, Pete Dexter, Philip Roth, Robert Stone, Richard Russo, Scott Spencer, T C Boyle, Dennis Johnson, Rupert Thomson, William Boyd, J M Coetzee, Richard Ford, Michael Cunningham, Russell Banks, Peter Cameron, and William Trevor. As for formative influences, I might mention Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Raymond Carver, Thomas Hardy, W Somerset Maugham, or Graham Greene.

Detect a pattern?

When I am mindful, I might recall one or two female authors whom I genuinely hold in high regard: Margaret Forster, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Helen Dunmore, Maria McCann, Kiran Desai, Amy Bloom, Barbara Kingsolver, Hester Kaplan, Joy Williams, Jean Thomson, Sadie Jones, or Hilary Mantel. As for formative influences, I might acknowledge Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, or Flannery O'Connor. Still, even with my library
to jog my memory, the list of women writers I revere is relatively short. Embarrassingly short.

Historically, of course, women were not encouraged to invade the world of letters, and it makes sense that a writer like Wharton was an anomaly in the early 20th century. But these days, with publishers so keen to capitalise on the fact that the vast majority of fiction readers are female, women have no comparative difficulty getting into print.

Also, on AbeBooks, female fiction is discussed and how little of it is revered as much as male fiction.

From that story...

In 1837, Charlotte Brontë wrote a letter and enthusiastic submission to then Poet Laureate Robert Southey, including some of her poetry. While Southey acknowledged the skill and talent within the writing, he was dismissive and discouraging of her efforts, and advised her not to bother attempting to write professionally, as the literary world belonged to men, and was no place for a woman. Rather than giving up, Brontë and her two sisters Emily and Anne continued to write, and were published - under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Men’s names. That story should be of little surprise, given the politics of the 19th century.

What about a full century-and-a-half later, in 1995? When J.K. Rowling published the first of her record-obliterating Harry Potter books, she was not “J.K.”, but simply Joanne. It was her publisher, fearing that young boys, whose interests they hoped to catch, might be put off by a female author, who requested she switch to the gender neutral “J.K’. As Rowling has no middle name, the “K” in J.K. Rowling is an invention, taken from her paternal grandmother’s name, Kathleen. Forbes Magazine estimated Rowling’s net worth at $1 billion in March 2010. Would Joanne Rowling have become the billionaire J.K. did?