Caliban assuming that the writer is describing his own face in the mirror?
Two pieces in today's Guardian G2 about the deplorable tendency of readers to assume that writers of fiction are just filing the names and serial numbers off reality: Melissa Benn and Linda Grant. Because if there is even one discernable point of overlap between the writer and their story (being part of a political family in Benn's, Jewish background in Grant's), it appears to be a truth universally acknowledged that all the rest must be a transcript of Reahlitee as well.
Not of course, that this is a new phenomenon: cf Charlotte Bronte and assumptions that Jane Eyre was not merely about her own life, but about her life as Thackeray's governess.
But it's depressingly pervasive: had discussion with someone on my flist about someone in their reading group who was making what I would consider an interpretation about the autobiographical basis for the marriages of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch and of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda which was not only vulgar and banal, but something that surely anyone who had read even the Ladybird Book on Great Victorian Lady Novelists would have found highly implausible? George Henry Lewes - up there with Leonard Woolf as the Supportive Spouse most women artists can only dream of. Original of Casuabon? - Eliot on record as pointing to herself (touch of the Flaubert's, no? - what, female writers can't cross-dress too?).
Only the dream, said my dear Dame Rebecca writing about autobiography, compels truth. But imaginative truth is clearly what too many readers cannot get their heads around. Okay, people bring their own stuff and experiences to the story, but the container they find for it is likely to be something that permits remix and rearrangement and objets trouvees and made up things.
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Jude Kelly artistic director of the Southbank Centre, responds to Margaret Hodge's claim that there were far too few women in key roles at UK arts organisations. Some choice extracts:
One thing's for certain: if women have managed to get to the top of the arts world, they won't have used any old girls' network. There is no equivalent of the boys' club in our world. Women in the top posts will have got there on sheer flair, stamina, determination and conscientiousness. If it's true that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, then women have certainly sweated copiously. The degree of self-propulsion required has the real disadvantage of singling women out as "ambitious" as they rise in their careers - something that is perceived as unattractive in women.
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[A]ttending some strange leadership course, my leadership abilities were marked approvingly as "double masculine". My own experience of women leaders is that they are enterprising, inclusive, humorous and fair. The only criticism that might be levelled at them is that sometimes, if only because it saves time, they credit an idea to a man - just to make it happen. I've been guilty of this myself.
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[W]hen I have left senior arts posts and we have advertised for my successor, I have been shocked by how few women make the eventual shortlist. When I have talked to potential female candidates about why they didn't apply, they usually tell me they didn't think they would get it. Most men at this level don't seem to have such self-doubt. Additionally, some of the male recruitment boards have used phrases such as "plucky lass" or "feisty woman", as if to imply that the shortlisted few lacked the necessary gravitas to fill the role. Essentially, they were over-reaching themselves.
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[I]f you gathered many of these senior women together for a Caryl Churchill-style Top Girls dinner party, and asked them to recount the different ways they have been ridiculed and caricatured, the result would be a shocking indication of the scale of casual sexism.
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Hannah Pool speaks to talkshow host Trisha Goddard about racism in the media
Don't start me on racism in television. You should talk to my business partner, because as a white male, he will often see things that I don't; people wait until I've left the room.
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I have never had so many misquotes to fit somebody else's agenda. They said to me, "How come you've never had any black partners?" I was born in England in 1957, I left England for Africa at four, I came back from Africa at nine. "Why didn't you date any black men in Africa?" Er, because it would have been paedophilia. Then I came to Norfolk. Jesus, look around, find another black person here.