PANIC! It's the RETURN OF THE SCRIBBLING SISTERHOOD!
How women conquered the world of fiction: 'From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify?'.
(We remark that women have been doing rather well in the world of fiction since the days of Aphra Behn, if you're talking the anglophone novel...)
Well, after centuries of men getting all the awards and the big deals and the canonisation and the reviews and the pundits claiming that they never read gurliez books -
- and if women are allowed in it is one or two at a time, and it is often on cat-fight grounds, and it is either because of their exquisite needlepointy two inches of ivory skillz, or their unfeminine strength and power -
- and we notice that what we are addressing here anyway is that what we might call the unmarked genre of litfic.
Perhaps the boyz are doing what the gurlz have been doing for these centuries, since at least The Gothic was a thing, and finding that genre is a more comfortable home?
And honestly, the squealing from affronted males: “Why is that ‘lovely to see’?” a male publisher emailed me shortly after the list was announced. “Can you imagine the opposite, a shortlist of five men and one woman, about which the chair says, ‘It’s lovely to see men dominating the shortlist’?”
No, because they assumed that that was the way of nature, how it was and ever had been and would be for ever and ever, hallelujah amen.
This same publisher goes whingeing on about the number of editors who are women. I suspect that this is not unique to this point in history - publishing has always been somewhere with a lot of women, if not women-dominated. One can think of famed women editors who are famed for their work with notoriously Difficult Men (Diana Athill for one, eh?). He doesn't seem to have much sense of history, what?
And if 'Male writers definitely seem to be feeling more reticent about sex' is this actually due to the maenads of feminism and 'wokeness', or a fear of being cited for the annual Bad Sex Award?
As my darling Dame Rebecca once remarked, that tendency to go and see what women are doing, and tell them to stop it at once?
Rob Doyle actually gets it right, I think, or at least, that the novel historically has come from the margins: But Rob Doyle suggests that maybe having pariah status isn’t such a bad thing. “It strikes me that really good writing and great literature historically has not come from glory and triumph. It has come from abjection and opposition.”
Nobody is entitled to a Booker Prize or the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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