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State of the Arts

The fightback against male domination of serious literature is on – and women are winning battle after battle

As women authors dominate the US and UK bestsellers lists, our arts columnist Fiona Sturges looks at how the previous status quo in literature is being disrupted for the better

Friday 23 August 2019 12:11 BST
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Bottom left clockwise: Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Kate Atkinson, Jia Tolentino and Candice Carty-Williams
Bottom left clockwise: Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Kate Atkinson, Jia Tolentino and Candice Carty-Williams

Time was when we knew where we were with books. Big, important men wrote big, important masterworks about science, politics and history that, if enough people bought them, would swiftly be absorbed into the canon. Women writers, meanwhile, were viewed as niche and thus awarded their own specialist categories, among them “romance”, “chick-lit” and “women’s fiction” – let the record show that there is no such thing as “men’s fiction”. These books would invariably come swathed in frou-frou pastel-hued jackets with swirly writing lest people – OK, men – mistake them for works to be taken seriously.

Lately, however, a wave of women have emerged to disrupt the male-dominated status quo. This summer’s literary barnstormers have been by women: Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble and Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky. At the time of writing, the top five Sunday Times’ hardbacks are all by female writers, while four out of the top five titles on the New York Times bestseller list, in both fiction and non-fiction categories, are by women.

For these writers, success arrives in spite of a publishing industry that frequently lionises male authors while overlooking, sidelining or actively denigrating women. Last year a survey conducted in North America of more than two million books revealed that titles by female authors are, on average, sold at less than half the price of those by their male counterparts. Studies have furthermore shown that men still favour books written by men, and are more likely to recommend books by men to their peers, and publishing houses are more likely to submit male authors for literary prizes (hence the existence of women-only prizes, because how else is a girl to get a professional pat on the back?). Meanwhile, books reviewed in the media tilt heavily towards titles by male authors, despite the fact that women outnumber men both as authors and readers. Oh, and reviews for titles by women are twice as likely to reference the author’s age.

In a recent essay for The Atlantic on what she calls “the gender seriousness gap”, journalist Helen Lewis thoughtfully notes the ways in which authors themselves are objectified, a case in point being Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, who, in a profile piece by a male critic, was lauded for her “sensuous lips”. Lewis also speaks to the novelist Elif Shafak who has experienced similar treatment by male commentators, and who observes that “a male novelist is primarily a novelist. Nobody talks about his gender. But a woman novelist is primarily a woman”.

If this all feels tiresomely inevitable, then perhaps we can be cheered by the current fightback. Last year saw the opening of beautifully bijou The Second Shelf in London’s Soho, selling rare books, first editions and rediscovered works by women. The owner AN Devers has said she was compelled to open her shop after years of trawling antiquarian book fairs where the emphasis was on male authors.

Similarly cheering is the founding of this year’s Primadonna Festival by a group of prominent women in publishing and entertainment including novelist Kit de Waal, broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, author and activist Catherine Mayer, editor Sabeena Akhtar and BBC comedy commissioning editor, Sioned Wiliam. The event, which takes place next weekend, aims to celebrate and elevate women’s writing and includes in its programme a panel discussion called Her Breasts Preceded Her into the Room, highlighting the excruciating, not to say anatomically incorrect, attempts by men to write about female sexuality.

Because, of course, the problematic treatment of women in publishing isn’t just structural ­– it’s how they are written about too. From Edmund White’s rhapsodising over breasts “that visibly strained at the breastbone like two puppies pulling on their leashes” (2000’s The Married Man), to Joseph Heller’s observation of a woman’s “buttocks and strong thighs shim-sham-shimmying this way and that way like some horrifying bonanza” (1961’s Catch-22), men have been writing atrociously about women and sex for decades, largely for the gratification of men. It’s only recently that we’ve seen women reclaiming their bodies for more constructive purposes.

This year has yielded non-fiction books by the anti-FGM campaigner Nimko Ali, journalists Lynn Enright and Eleanor Morgan, and the broadcaster Emma Barnett focused on demystifying and ending the shame over female anatomy. We have also seen women essayists including Sinead Gleeson, Jia Tolentino, Rebecca Solnit and Emilie Pine mining their personal lives as they have variously discussed eating disorders, sex, consent, health and power, all the while showing women’s bodies to be a political battleground. All of which would suggest that women authors, as well as being a powerful unit-shifting force, are finally taking control of their own narratives. But it’s only when spurious women-specific genres are finally dispensed with that we’ll know the war is finally won.

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