Essential difference or different treatment?

Apropos my last post, here's a Guardian article by Gabriel Brownstein which considers the role of marketing in the 'genderization' of fiction.  The article also touches on whether men and women write differently, and there are some interesting comments - one or two of them unwittingly telling in the matter of unconscious bias.

It Takes a Man to Say These Things

When Jodi Picoult and Lionel Shriver (or any other women writers) say it, it's too likely to look like sour grapes, but today in the Guardian Pankaj Mishra argues thoughtfully that for the establishment 'great' only ever signifies 'the passionate ambition of white men, never women.'

Mishra is also concerned with other prejudices beside gender: for arbiters like Time magazine, he says, 'literature is summed up by the big, panoptic novel about the American, usually suburban condition, not the formally resourceful poem and short story or intellectually rigorous essay.'

It's interesting, too, that he points out the often suburban concerns of the 'great' male American novel, since the general perception is that 'suburban' is one of the sub-characteristics for which women's literature is deemed generally lesser.

Also in the Guardian today, in the same edition in which Andrew Motion, chair of this year's Booker panel, complains about the poor editing the judges encountered (as did Claire Armitstead recently regarding the Guardian First Book Award), there's a very interesting letter from Chris Parker which I think is worth quoting:

...falling editorial standards is shared by editors themselves. As well as having to correct the most basic spelling and punctuation mistakes made by authors "educated" since the mid-70s, editors are frequently asked by publishers to copyedit and proofread (two distinct processes) at the same time. Before the 1990s, a typescript would be subjected, before typesetting, to a rigorous copyediting process, then proofread (often by two people) to ensure that all the copyeditor's changes had been implemented. We are now asked by most publishers to "cast a quick eye" over proofs which have been set straight from authors' disks, bypassing the editorial process altogether.

Self-promotion and Underpromotion

The Not the Booker Prize over on the Guardian books blog has raised the very interesting question of the role of social networking in making books known. (Must say, stuck in my literary purdah in the Welsh hills I hadn't even caught that the Prize was going on in the first place - the Guardian blog page takes five minutes to load up in the mountain, if it loads up at all, that is - leave alone had the ability to rally my mates and fans to nominate my book, if I could bring myself to do such a thing, so I guess that tells you something.)

And Lionel Shriver gets her teeth into the issue of male versus female novelists and gives it a good shake, arguing that female writers never receive the kind of accolades awarded to their male counterparts, and suffer from an infantilizing 'prettification' by marketing departments:

...trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress

Are Publishers Anti-Male?

Well, after the discussion under my last post, here's an interesting article on the Huffington Post claiming that there's anti-male bias in publishing. Thanks to Sam Jordison via Twitter.

It's a Man's World

Anyone who thinks that there is no need for the Orange Prize or any form of such positive discrimination for women, should read Bidisha's witty and excoriating assessment of the gender imbalance in the arts in today's Guardian. She presents an irrefutable list of instances (including review pages, arts events, festivals, theatre, literary prizes) which are overwhelmingly balanced in favour of men. She notes that

in 41 years of the Booker prize the jury has been male dominated 30 times. There have been 28 male winners and 15 female winners. That said, the one time there were four women and one man on the jury, in 1986, they chose Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils over Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. God. Why do women love misogynists so much? Is it Stockholm syndrome? [Yes, I'd say: women are always bending over backwards not to be thought feminists or even female.]

She comments that

it's all the more galling given that women equal or outnumber men as attendees of arts festivals, concerts, readings, discussions and debates, and as arts and humanities students at university. Women write, read, edit and publicise more fiction than men Women make up the majority of executive, PR and organisational staff in arts and cultural institutions. Women's ticket revenue, licence fees, book purchases and entrance fees are being used to fund events at which women artists and thinkers are marginalised with breathtaking obviousness.

She points out too how the perception of this situation is skewed - even for those with the truth most closely under their noses:

When I was judging the Orange prize last year we all noticed how major bookshops consistently stacked 10 men's books to every one woman's book on its "recommended read" tables – in whatever genre. In one bookshop, fellow judge Martha Lane Fox was told barefacedly by the sales guy that this was because men published 10 times as much fiction as women.

She's sick, she says, of being the token woman on panels, and she's no longer prepared 'to give my time and attention – and implicitly, my support – to any event, such as the debates at How The Light Gets In, that gives space to five times as many men as women.'

I suppose this means that she'll no longer light up the discussions on Newsnight Review, or whatever it's called since it dumbed itself down, and on which, I've always noted, the men panelists outnumber the women. Shame.

Orange Prize Shortlist, Connections and Misery

The Orange Prize shortlist is announced, and the interesting story of Rosie Alison, the shortlister who didn't get a single national review, becomes even more interesting: turns out she had a prominent books industry connection she made a point of not using, and her now shortlisted novel was turned down over and over until independent Alma Books picked it up.

And Daisy Goodwin continues with her theme of too much misery in women's fiction: 'The Lovely Bones has a lot to answer for', we are told she says today.

Women and Writing

I have more than I can possibly settle down to say about Rachel Cusk's Guardian article on women and writing, and the way it relates to my own writing experience - on a weekend, that is, when I'm gearing up for builders, meetings, another trip to London, pre-Christmas and Christmas visitors and, ironically, trying to find time even to get back into my room of my own to actually write (and realizing that December, which I had planned to set aside for a new story, is in all practical ways nearly over). Maybe I'll write about the article soon (on the train, perhaps, though laptopping on those Pendolinos makes me trainsick). Suffice for the present to say that she rang a lot of bells for me, and I'm still ringing...

Women: Stick to Your Knitting

While Tim Lott cries into his milk about perceived female hegemony in our literary culture, this week a male magazine staffer declines an offer of a short story of mine by addressing me as 'Mrs Baines.'

Mr Baines was unavailable to comment on behalf of his wife since he doesn't exist any more than she does, but Ms Baines was feeling pretty put out by the thought of some toffee-nosed male Oxford grad (who no doubt believes himself done down by the women in publishing) deciding, like one of the Telegraph commenters, that she ought to go back to her knitting like a good married woman. (See, two can play at that stereotyping game.)

To Speak or Not of Gender Bias

While the dominant literary stags have been busy clashing antlers, female writers have been re-emerging from the shadowy trees. Apart from the the long-overdue recognition of Doris Lessing, and in the wake of Jonathan Coe's tribute to the reclaimed Virago novelists, Joyce Johnson, fifties girlfriend of the more famous Jack (Kerouac), looks about to be recognized at last as a literary figure in her own right.

Doris Lessing is famously annoyed by any discussion of writers in terms of their gender, and on the highest literary level she is of course right to be. Trouble is, though, if we don't point out gender biases in our perception of fiction, we risk perpetuating them. As the Guardian's Laura Barton points out: Johnson's work, 'like that of many female artists, has been ushered to the sidelines of the beat movement.'

She goes on:

...unlike On the Road and the rest of Kerouac's canon, unlike the work of Ginsberg and Burroughs and Gary Snyder, Johnson's novels are now out of print - a situation that seems strangely to echo a passage from Minor Characters in which she recalls herself at 22, sitting black-clad in a beatnik bar in Greenwich Village: "The table in the exact centre of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that's alive ... As a female, she's not quite a part of this convergence. A fact she ignores, sitting by in her excitement as the voices of the men, always the men, passionately rise and fall."

Whose Territory?

Interesting. Jonathan Coe tells in the Guardian Saturday Review of the 'love affair' with Virago Modern Classics which he began as a student when his peers were immersing themselves in the male 'Granta generation' of Swift, Amis, Barnes and McEwan.

He writes of the revelation to him of Dorothy Richardson's subversive rhythmic prose which undercut the male narrative procedures of 'conflicts and linear progressions and sudden climaxes', and of May Sinclair's very different but equally singular novelistic power to select, pare down and omit. He tells us how they influenced him as a writer:

Before long, the Virago novels would unseat some of my deepest assumptions as a reader, and also alter my course as a writer.

He pays tribute (as I did recently) to those wonderful Virago covers. The sequence of Gwen John paintings of women reading on the Virago editions of Richardson's novels 'reflects', he says, 'upon the acts of reading and writing as essential ways for women to memorialise their experience, and insists, moreover, that a woman's experience has as much value as a man's'. Coe suggests that it is the Virago Modern Classics which have been largely instrumental in seeing off the kind of chauvinistic critical reception which women authors like Rosamond Lehmann once suffered.

Interestingly, however, he wonders if the gender bias which Virago challenged really has disappeared altogether. It might seem to have: male writers like Ian McEwan are no longer 'afraid to voyage in an "exclusively emotional and sexual sea" ', and 'Most of the new writers who have broken through to critical acclaim and big readerships in recent years have been women ... and these are, for the most part, writing big, historically and politically engaged novels.

Yet Coe is not convinced: I can't help thinking that some of that bias, subtle and unspoken, remains, he says, and points to the still male-dominated Booker shortlist as indication that the literary establishment has yet to learn to value women's writing.

I think Coe's instinct is right, love him, but he's not looking in quite the right place to prove it. He shouldn't just be looking at the literary establishment but at women writers themselves who have internalized the prejudices. While men like McEwan have taken up the challenge the women's presses offered, many young women writers have shied away from the territory that would brand them 'merely' women writers. I don't suppose I'm the only ex-women's press writer who read the disparaging and self-distancing reference to 'dusty Women's Press novels' in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and thought 'Ouch!'

Me, it warms the cockles of my heart that a man should be championing Virago and their writers in this way, but, like those contemporary women writers, I can't help wondering if this article, even now, would be seen as quite so authoritative had it been written by a woman.

A British Sporting Event?

Robert McCrum tells us that, unlike the Americans, we British don't like lists and 'bests of' in our cultural life. Well, you could have fooled me, and anyway he goes ahead and gives us one: The Observer Best Novel of the Past 25 Years and runners up.

The winner is JM Coetzee, with Disgrace (in good old colonial style The Observer, 'following the Booker', decided to define 'British' as including 'Ireland and the literary traditions of the Commonwealth'); 2nd place goes to Martin Amis's Money, and joint third to five novels: Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Joint eighth place is shared by Ishiguro (again) (The Remains of the Day) and John McGahern with two novels, Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun.

This is not a readers' poll. If this poll has any consequence, McCrum opines, it derives from the fact that we have consulted with mainly professionals. Ah, that best of British... Those polled were writers themselves and critics. Well, I have recently argued that writers are excluded from debate about the meanings of their work, but this is not that kind of debate. It does not appear to be much of a debate at all, but just another of those winners-past-the-post British exercises, pitting different kinds of writing against each other in the pursuit of some kind of mythical pinnacle.

What does it all mean? McCrum feels that his wider trawl through the 'Commonwealth' makes The Observer poll more culturally inclusive than the similar American poll conducted last spring, but putting culturally diverse writings in competition with each other, in which some will 'win' and some won't, is surely to operate exclusivity. I notice some names missing from the list of those polled - apparently some declined, for these sorts of reasons - and isn't it obvious that writers, understandably, might well gun for the kind of writing which includes their own? (One would never want to accuse anyone of voting for their friends, of course!) And does it mean anything that, although the list of voters is almost half women, only one woman makes it to the first eight, and out of 51 runners-up only 18 are women? (What, so it's true, then: women's novels are less good than men's? Or no: women novelists are still in awe of the men while the men aren't so thrilled by the women? Which?)

And some of the names missing from the list of voters? Well, actually, JM Coetzee, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Is there some kind of poetic (or novelistic) justice going on here?

Female Waffling

The recent Art of Fiction post about the loss of the Manchester Dutch Pancake House reminds me of one of my more depressing writing experiences.

Having the misfortune of being women writers (and yes, you blasted feminists, I choose my words carefully!), I and a mate of mine were once invited to address The Women Writers' Network in London. One of the main features of this visit was the fact that the committee members would take us out to dinner beforehand at a Dutch Pancake House somewhere near Haymarket.

Indeed, the most important feature: we were greeted with great excitement about the treat in store, and it slowly dawned on us that our main function that evening was to serve as an excuse for this outing. As soon as we had begun to tuck in to our glutinous servings, a conversation began around us about the best store in London to have arrange your wedding list. I kid you not, this was only a few years ago.

Well, after a bit they realised that they were being rude to their visiting authors, and that we were sharing murderous glances, and so they asked us politely: 'Well, where would you get your wedding list from?'

'I don't know what the hell you're on about,' said my mate, and they froze in horror and offence over their blueberry waffles or whatever they were, and the rest of the evening was pretty strained, and that was it for the credentials of me and my mate in the Good Fellowship of Women Writers.