A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  Novels by women are most often seen as books for women only, and this is just not true of novels by men.

  I do see that there is an argument which says that ‘ghettoizing’ women’s writing, such as in Virago or the Women’s Prize, does not work against this problem but actually reinforces it, but to that I would say, what we actually do is expose the otherwise invisible problem of women’s talent not being seen as equal to men’s. We do not subscribe to a sort of ‘gender-blind’, anonymous creed; we alert readers to the fact that these books are by women; that these great books are by women and are worth reading by all. If instead we are not honest about how there is a difference in the way a book is perceived if it has a man’s or a woman’s name on the spine; if we ignore the truth that authors’ names carry a gendered message; if we pretend that choosing books to read, to review, to win prizes is a perfectly neutral, even-handed game, we mask the issue.

  Grace Paley, referring to women in the past who used initials or male pseudonyms, and to her own first poetry submissions as G. C. Paley, brilliantly sums up the paradox: ‘Women hid in order to be seen.’

  You can hide, or you can ‘come out’ as female.

  And you might as well come out as female and name yourself because the fact is, as Joyce Carol Oates ruefully noted, ‘The woman who writes is a writer by her own definition, but a “woman writer” by others’ definitions.’

  We’ve got rid of ‘poetess’ and ‘authoress’, but we still have ‘woman writer’. You will never hear the term ‘man writer’. He’s a writer: genderless apparently, but certainly neutral and therefore universal and of universal appeal.

  Women readers do see universality of meaning and relevance in men’s novels, as on the whole women read across genres and genders. Of course, everyone has favourite writers and individual tastes, but women readers show again and again that even if they favour women, they will almost certainly also read many books by men. They may not even notice their choices.

  This is particularly true of literary fiction, and I want to look at literary fiction because even though it might attract fewer readers than, say, crime or romantic fiction or ‘beach novels’, what it does command is headlines, prizes, reviews, features, author appearances at festivals: in other words, high visibility and respect. A headline in the Observer to mark the Booker Prize at fifty says it all: ‘Flawed—but still the best way to judge our literature’.

  And I think literature is still a good way to judge our society. Literary fiction animates readers, makes us think—even changes how we think—and survives after we die. These are the books that become set texts, are translated into other languages, and are incorporated into the literary canon. These are the books that society—or rather, those who have the platform to make such judgements—deem great.

  The Virago Modern Classics began in 1978 with the idea of blasting this canon wide open: to challenge the narrow notion of ‘great’ and also to challenge the idea of who gets to decide what is great.

  Because who decides what is noteworthy needs to be illuminated. For years women have highlighted the fact that book review pages and literary prizes have been dominated by men. Back in 1990 Margaret Atwood said reviewing was ‘where you are likely to see gender bias, bias of all kinds’, but it only seems to have changed marginally since then.

  VIDA, a ‘non-profit feminist organization committed to creating transparency around the lack of gender parity in the literary landscape’, has been doing heroic work measuring male and female review coverage—and who writes the reviews—in the American press and some of the British papers, and finding parity woefully slow. In Britain, the Emilia Report into the Gender Gap for Authors by Danuta Keane, published in spring 2019, showed that though there has been an increase in the number of women reviewers, male writers are still more reviewed than women, even when writing comparable fiction.

  The report quotes the writer Kate Mosse, co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction: ‘Literature with a capital L is still not seen as a neutral literary voice if it is women writing from their own point of view.’

  Which brings me to the prizes.

  After February 1992, when the writer many of us would call the great Angela Carter died, a group of us—publishers, agents, and writers—gathered in the Kentish Town, north London, flat of the then Curtis Brown agent Anne McDermid. We were outraged that none of Angela’s novels had ever troubled the shortlist of the Booker, but nor had other women fared well. In the Booker’s first thirty years the shortlists tallied 63 per cent male, and in the five years preceding our meeting only five women had been shortlisted, compared to twenty-four men. In those first thirty years, eleven women won. (Over the subsequent years, the prize has gone to nine female writers—boosted by two women, Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo, sharing the prize in 2019—which means that in fifty years of the prize only twenty novels by women have won, and of those women Hilary Mantel, writing about Thomas Cromwell, won twice.) A look at the judges shows that even with an almost equal number of men and women on the panel more men than women made the shortlists. Did women, too, subscribe to the idea that the prize was for big, important novels by men? What was the prevailing notion of ‘great’?

  We planned a new and bold prize for fiction by women that would challenge the Booker Prize. We wanted to demonstrate to the judges, the writers, and the world that they were looking at authors either through a clouded lens or they had their eyes shut. We would counter their predominantly male prize with a women-only award and, most importantly, we’d raise the purse. The Booker at the time awarded £25,000; we would make ours £30,000. We wanted to indicate from the start that we were not an insignificant extra, a small protesting voice. This group eventually whittled itself down to a small committee of women (of which I was not a member) including Kate Mosse, who took the prize to extraordinary glory and success; one that is still a combative challenge to the Booker. In provoking discussions about visibility for women novelists, just like Virago does, the Women’s Prize—like the new Jhakal Prize—does not let drop the conversations about what is great literature and who decides. I see us as so much more than mere conscience-pricking—not least as many of the winning books have far outsold the Booker winners—but that certainly is one of our jobs.

  But it’s not only women who have noted the Booker blindness. Robert McCrum, looking back over the half-century of the Booker, notes,

  Having been right about the English literature of India, Australia and the rest, the prize misjudged the other big story of these decades, the emergence of a brilliant new generation of female novelists. In hindsight, this was predictable. A book prize cooked up [in 1968] by middle-aged men in the smoke-filled rooms of London’s clubland was likely to have a tin ear when it came to the innovations of contemporary female writers at the cutting edge. While a feminist literary revolution led by Virago transformed the reading lives of a new generation, Booker was struggling . . . It did not recognise Elizabeth Taylor in 1971 (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont); passed over Beryl Bainbridge five times; missed Muriel Spark in 1981 (Loitering with Intent), and never even shortlisted Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.

  Even though it is gratifying to be proved right and to see Virago recognized, what is striking to me is his acknowledgment that middle-aged men were likely to have tin ears when it came to women writers.

  Why are the men tone deaf?

  It seems to me that there are two reasons. First, there is a perception of what readers think the book is going to be about—before they even pick it up. Secondly, and this is in some ways more shocking, I think a novel written by a woman is read differently from one written by a man. What we have here is not gendered writing, but gendered reading. It’s a term I first learned from Lisa Appignanesi, and it makes everything very clear.

  I love the Booker winner Anne Enright’s slightly outrageous observation:

  It is tempting to [. . . conclude] that men and women are read differently, even when they write t
he same thing. If a man writes ‘The cat sat on the mat’ we admire the economy of his prose; if a woman does we find it banal. If a man writes ‘The cat sat on the mat’ we are taken by the simplicity of his sentence structure, its toughness and precision. We understand the connection between ‘cat’ and ‘mat’, sense the grace of the animal, admire the way the percussive monosyllables sharpen the geometrics of the mat beneath [. . .] If, on the other hand, a woman writes ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ her concerns are clearly domestic, and sort of limiting. Time to go below the comments line and make jokes about pussy . . . I am kidding, of course. These are anxieties, projections, phantasmagoria—things to which women are particularly prone.

  She finishes this ‘projection’ with a deprecating note about women’s anxieties, and I am not surprised. The number of times I have sat beside some of the most famous novelists in the English language as they sign books for long queues and have to listen as every age of man hastens to say, ‘It’s not for me. My wife loves your books,’ are legion. And insulting, boring, and belittling.

  Does reading novels about women demean men? Are they anxious about being associated with femaleness? What do they think femaleness is about?

  Most women writers know they are up against this prejudice—from individuals, the review pages, and the literary festivals. It’s confirmed by those men who are not tin-eared.

  The novelist John Boyne wrote: ‘I’ve been publishing novels for almost 20 years [and] I’ve become increasingly aware of double standards in the industry. A man is treated like a literary writer from the start, but a woman usually has to earn that commendation.’ At a literary festival in 2017, he noticed that ‘a trio of established male writers were referred to . . . as “giants of world literature”, while a panel of female writers of equal stature were . . . “wonderful storytellers” . . . [But] I think women are better novelists than men. There, I’ve said it. While it’s obviously an enormous generalisation, it’s no more ludicrous than some half-wit proudly claiming never to read books by women.’

  I wonder if the words ‘domestic novel’ hover over most books with a woman’s name on the cover, and if ‘domestic’ is standing in for ‘emotion’, ‘family’, ‘love’. Yet we know that if you are a man and write about the intimate, about feelings, that term does not apply; instead, impressive writers such as Ian McEwan, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje, Colm Tóibín, Julian Barnes et al. are applauded for writing about intimacy and the important things.

  I remember standing in my kitchen and cheering out loud when the writer Helen Simpson responded to what sounded like a criticism about writing domestic short stories on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Her answer cut through to the truth: ‘Calling a work of fiction domestic is a political not a literary judgement.’

  Gendered reading is making a judgement: assuming this novel is going to be about things of interest to women only.

  I am making a speech about Virago at the British Institute in Florence. At the end a man—friendly, interested—stands up and waves a piece of paper, and says, ‘If this was a story with no name attached, could you tell if it was written by a man or woman?’

  I want to sigh. This is an old question that has besieged Virago and the other feminist presses from the start. Do men write differently from women? And—definitely the subconscious question—which is better? The answer is no, the greatest likelihood is that I could not tell. But what I realize I should have said—and, of course, the best response always comes to one later, in bed that night—is what differences do you think you would find, even before reading, once you knew the gender of the writer?

  We should have moved on from the time when Anthony Burgess said approvingly of Olivia Manning that she was never, like so many women novelists, limited to experiences of her own sex, but I really am not sure we have.

  I think in challenging the perception, significance, and reception of novels by women—in prizes and reviews among others—we are showing up the underlying assumptions. We are saying there is no such thing as a limiting female experience and nor is there a male universal one. We are also putting paid to the idea of domestic as pejorative and inferior when it is in the hands of the female novelist.

  In 2013, outraged by the way that Fifty Shades of Grey was ushering in a ‘wave of essentialism once more sweeping the woman’s world’, authors and friends Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes, and Susie Orbach edited a volume of essays we called Fifty Shades of Feminism and published to great success. In her piece, Siri Hustvedt, renowned novelist married to another renowned novelist, so able to witness different responses to his and her work, wrote, ‘We, all of us, women and men, encode masculinity and femininity in implicit metaphorical schemas that divide the world in half. Science and mathematics are hard, rational, real, serious and masculine. Literature and art are soft, irrational, unreal, frivolous and feminine . . . Anything that becomes associated with girls and women loses status, whether it is a profession, a book, a movie or a disease.’ In a later interview she goes on to explain why she thinks male writers have an equal number of men and women readers whereas female writers are read primarily by women: ‘A male novelist hardens and dignifies the form, while a female novelist is doubly penalised as a woman working in an unserious form.’

  Are women authors also afraid of what happens to their readership when they ‘come out’ as female? Interestingly, the novelist Rachel Cusk wrote that ‘the woman writer still risks’ taking female and female experiences as her subject and she certainly has taken much flak over the years for writing honestly about them.

  What is sad about listening yet again to an author or agent on her behalf ask me, ‘Will men read the book?’ is that the frank answer is, if current circumstances are anything to go on, and men continue to read little literary fiction and even less by women, then probably not.

  That is both enraging and depressing; and also fascinating that we women still seem to think we have to measure success by how much we capture a male readership. That is partly because we all see that the cultural upper hand is still held by white men, but it’s also because from time immemorial we women have read and discussed novels by men—and it’s only natural to want the favour returned.

  Sarah Churchwell, who wrote Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby for us, concurs: ‘Male readers . . . rarely use the compliment “universal” to describe a book written by a woman: in fact, it’s difficult to recall a single instance.

  ‘Patriarchy works unseen to valorise men’s perspective, and invalidate women’s. When we don’t recognise the way it shapes the world, then we do not understand that world properly: our perspective becomes unreliable. In other words, patriarchy continues to gaslight us all’

  Gas Light was a clever 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton. Gaslighting has come to mean the deliberate undermining of another’s sanity, and about women fighting to get men to see their experience.

  I remember the first time I read a contemporary novel set in Toronto, on streets I recognized, in a country that was mine. I felt a thrill of recognition, of validation; that the background to my life was worthy of being in a book—it was that important. I’d had no understanding until then about how I, the reader, was identifying with characters and places that had nothing to do with me. I was in the Midwest, a young girl in a covered wagon; I was Pip, in a graveyard frightened by Magwitch; I was Tom, painting the fence; I was frightened by the black spot in Treasure Island; I was Oliver, running from the law with Fagin; I was flying with Peter Pan; and I was Anne, with an ‘e’, with hated red hair and freckles on a small island in eastern Canada: all places, people, and time periods I had never experienced. Of course this is exactly what fiction should do for a reader: transport them to another time and place, make them live and breathe the hero or heroine’s life. But suddenly to have a book that really was about me, in my neck of the woods, was eye-opening. It meant I too was important. When I think of that now, I begin
to understand why women so effortlessly continue to cross into men’s worlds: we’ve done it all our reading lives. I also note that all these books are by white authors and with white protagonists; readers of colour, male and female, and trans readers must make another leap too.

  I live in hope that for the younger generation of readers, publishers, and authors coming up behind me that these observations and this conversation will soon be out of date.

  I return to Anne Enright: ‘There is a difference between a culture that tilts male and a culture that does not see what it is doing.’

  Since we began, Virago and feminists have been showing the culture what it is doing. Maybe people can now see.

  What does it take to be a successful writer? Beyond writing a brilliant book, you have to be visible, strategic—you have to be immodest. Until very recently, and even now I would say, that is still not the norm. The woman who calls attention to herself and her talent is running a risk. It’s still considered better if she waits for the accolades than acts as if it is her due.

  Elaine Showalter, a critic who has long been important to Virago, has observed this: ‘Women have been too dignified and self-effacing to make their own claims to artistic immortality. Women novelists do not observe the rituals of male literary artistry that sustain historical memory; they have rarely produced manifestoes, aligned themselves in a notable school, named their generation (whether Lost or Beat) and their genre, or feuded heroically and publicly with a critic-double, or a female rival.’

  When John Updike died, there were pieces on the radio and in the papers bemoaning the death of the Great American novel (Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Updike being the pantheon). Poor America was left with only Philip Roth, and now that he too has gone we got a reprise of this lament. But what about Marilynne Robinson, Donna Tartt, Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Anne Tyler, Ann Patchett, Siri Husvedt, to name just a few . . .?