How close are we to androgyny?

Interviewed about the newly announced longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), Natasha Walter, one of the judges, says that she was struck by the number of women writing from male viewpoints. Like Telegraph writer Sameer Rahim noting a similarity in the Costa winners, she sees this as possible evidence of a move towards the fulfilment of Virginia Woolf's wish for women writers to be seen as androgynous rather than as women. Others, however, including me (see this post), suspect a different implication. Kira Cochrane writes:

If a woman adopts a male perspective, it seems their story is still more likely to be respected, and read as universal. The author Naomi Alderman is well aware of this bias, and notes that the women who have won the Booker include: "Hilary Mantel writing about a strong man [Thomas Cromwell]. Pat Barker writing about the first world war and men's experiences. AS Byatt, yes there's a woman in it, but actually a lot of Possession is first-person writing as a man. Let's look at their names: Hilary, Pat and AS. These are names a man can read on the train and you don't necessarily immediately know that they're reading [a book by] a woman."

Women and winning

So the 2013 Costa winners are announced: they are novelist Hilary Mantel, new writer Francesca Segal, poet Kathleen Jamie, graphic memoirists Mary and Bryan Talbot and children's author, Sally Gardner. While Telegraph writer Sameer Rahim cheers the fact that they are all female and wonders if this makes the all-women former Orange prize (which is still looking for a sponsor) redundant, it occurs to your blogger that the fact that he can find their all-female character so noticeable makes the answer no. He also notes that

three of the five Costa winners have male protagonists – evidence, if we needed it, that the authors are pursuing the stories that interest them and do not feel in the slightest inhibited their gender.

Hm. There are some odd implications here. Could there possibly be a hint that stories about men are more interesting than stories about women, even to women writers? That if women work with female protagonists they are somehow being inhibited by their gender? Even (it could follow) that female gender is essentially inhibiting (unless you escape it with a male protagonist?) Is it true that it still is? How many women writers, I wonder, create male protagonists because they know, consciously or unconsciously, that in our culture the male still stands for normal and the female is, well, female and therefore minority? In fact, you know, for this reason it's much simpler (as a woman), I find, to write with a male protagonist. Bring on a female protagonist and right away you're battling with complex issues and barriers both for your protagonist and her way of being in the world and indeed for your book, not least among the barriers being that it it is known that women readers are happy to read about men but male readers are less keen to read about women. (Even the remarkably sensitive men in my reading group still show this tendency to some extent.) Well, it's less hard than it was, I think, but I do reckon it would be really interesting to study the proportions of male and female protagonists in successful and/or prizewinning books by women.

Women just have to do men down, don't they?

A little belatedly (I'm busy writing), here's an article on gender bias in the fiction industry, by Joanna Trollope, chair of this year's Fiction Prize for Women (as we must now call it, since Orange have pulled their sponsorship to concentrate on film, and a new sponsor is being sought).

The vicious comments beneath prove her point, I think.

The critic, the artist and the ego

I love the Guardian extract, concerning critics and prizes, from Stephen Sondheim's forthcoming book, Look I Made a Hat. He's pretty much on about the artists's ego, which might seem self-centred,  but it's a serious point that artists and writers need buoyant egos to go on working. Here are the bits I really like:

On critics:

A good critic is someone who recognises and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been.

On prizes:

What sours my grapes is the principle of reducing artists to contestants. Competitive awards boost the egos of the winners (until they lose) and damage the egos of the losers (until they win), while feeding the egos of the voters (all the time). Just as there are people who claim to be immune to public criticism, so there are those who claim to be unaffected by being passed over for an award from their supposed peers. But, as in the case of the critic-immune, I've not met any who have convinced me. It isn't so much that you want to be deemed the best; it's more that you don't want to be deemed second best. No matter who the voters are, and whether you accept them as worthy of judging you, winning means they like you more than your competitors.

In conclusion:

...the only meaningful recognition is recognition by your peers or, more accurately, people you consider your peers, and peer recognition is a very personal matter. An artist's peers are other artists, not necessarily in the same field – ie, musicians for musicians, painters for painters – but people who understand what you're trying to do simply because they're trying to do a similar thing.

On the first point, I'd add that a favourable review that nevertheless entirely misses the point of your work can be almost as bad as an unfavourable review - or, well, pretty dismaying. On the second, I'd add that the pernicious thing about prizes is that the also-rans become second-best in the eyes of the public as well as the judges.
On the last, I'd heartily agree, as far as an artist's ego goes, but then we have the matter, don't we, of sales...?

An Apology

This post is an unreserved apology to William Skidelsky, literary editor of the Observer. In an overview post on the reactions to Vida's research on gender bias in reviewing, I attributed to him the view 'that while women read more than men, they mainly read the kinds of books that are not worthy of review'. He has pointed out to me that this is not a comment he made, nor a view he holds, and a look back at the Guardian article on which I was commenting shows that the comment was in fact that of TLS editor Peter Stothard, and related specifically to his own publication, thus: 'And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS... The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books.' It was a serious error on my part because people picked up on it in the comments section and ran with it.

This is the moment that the lone blogger - unsupported by editors or subeditors - dreads. For the past five years that I have been writing this blog I have lived in horror of making this kind of misrepresentation (and in the process providing fuel for the detractors of blogging), and I can tell you that when I received William Skidelsky's friendly but questioning message I went hot and cold all over. It's why blogging is so particularly time-consuming - the need to check back and double-check, which I signally failed to do on this occasion - and why it is not always compatible with the immersive, distracting and time-consuming project of writing a novel (which is why I think I failed on this occasion).

Once again, my sincere apologies to William Skidelsky, and my thanks to him for pointing out my error and enabling me to put it right.

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.

Do the men have it all?

* EDITED IN: This post originally attributed a comment to Observer literary editor William Skidelsky which was in fact made by TLS Peter Stothart (as reported in the linked Guardian article). The post has been altered accordingly, and my sincere apologies to William Skidelsky.

People are much exercised by the shocking statistics in a survey conducted by the American women's literary network Vida, showing male bias in numbers of literary reviewers and of the authors of books reviewed. The Guardian defends itself as being better than most and books editor Claire Armitstead points out that fewer women than men offer themselves as reviewers. Ruth Franklin, books editor of The New Republic confesses to being shocked at her own statistics and sets out to conduct her own survey proving that lit editors are only reflecting the situation created by publishers: publishers publish more books by male authors than by women. Bookslut's Jessica Crispin, who is equally shocked, along with her co-editor Michael Schaub, at their own record, will have no truck with such blame-shifting and the two co-editors are conducting a conversation about the implications for their own biases in choices of books for review and reviewers. Some comments on these posts are enlightening, many pleading that they read more books by men than by women because they simply like them better, discounting the question raised by Ruth Franklin of societally-induced unconscious bias - a concept which it looks as though thinkers of the 80s may as well not have bothered to flog to death. And notwithstanding our healthy and mainly female literary reading-group culture, TLS editor Peter Stothard raises hackles by opining that while women read more than men, they mainly read the kinds of books that are not worthy of review in his publication.