Female Authors and the Literary Elite

   An interview was drawn to my attention today with V.S Naipaul (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers), in which he basically writes-off women authors. Now why I may not agree with the generalisation that he makes, after careful deliberation, I actually find myself shocked to agree with him! Now before you stop reading this and write my own opinion off, just hear me out. On reading this article, I actually realised that I have very few books on my shelf which are written by women, something I found quite perplexing. It’s not that I don’t read books written by women, in fact I have read quite a few, but the books I often buy are books where I appreciate the authors writing. It just so happens, I like what men write more than women.

      When one considers the wider world of reading, there is a vast plethora of male writers who show incredible craft, and very few female. In fact though some consider the works of Jane Austen to be fantastic, I myself find them a sentimental bore. I have read some of the stuff written by Naipaul, and I really enjoy his writing, he truly does have a gift and depth of craft that not many living authors have today. When I think about women authors that have actually challenged me to think while reading their novels, I can’t even dredge up a name—actually I lie, there is ONE book I have read, written by a female that has really got me thinking, and that is Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. But even then, I don’t think it’s the craft that challenged me, so much as the content, it is a raw depiction of one girls struggle in a society where slavery is the norm, and I think the reason why it is so harrowing is that it is autobiographical.

            So let’s look at some female authors shall we. J.K Rowling is a female author I enjoy, but her level of craft is somewhat telling. She has improved vastly over the Harry Potter series, but she is still fairly sentimental (which doesn’t necessarily take away from the enjoyment). Stephanie Meyer is another female author who has risen to success lately, and don’t even get me started on the tripe she produces, if anything she helps Naipaul’s argument! Patricia Cornwall is another successful female author, but I find her books predictable, and she sticks rigidly to the tropes of crime fiction. There is perhaps only one female author I can think of who really stands out from all the others, one who continually surprises, innovated and shows incredible craft, Agatha Christie. I don’t really need to say much about her, as I’m sure most have read her books sometime in their lives, and if not, should.

            So what does this all mean? Well perhaps female authors still have a ways to go to actually get an even footing with men. I think perhaps some of the reasons for this lies in the history of writing itself. For the longest time writing has very often been a males domain, especially when it comes to writers of literary fiction. If you look back to the end of the 19^th century there was a wave of authors who wrote fiction for the intelligentsia, educated, sophisticated and complex, most of these authors would fall into the category of ‘literary fiction’, a highbrow, very complex, but extremely well written genre. Authors like T.S Elliot, Tolstoy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, et al. are all well noted, and all male. Sure there were females, more noted for their poetry works than prose. I hear many people bemoan these authors as boring, hard to read, highbrow etc. And they aren’t all wrong, after all War and Peace though a fantastic read is often tiresome, and hardly what one would call a page turner.

            What we have is a literary elite, for the educated elite, a category that Naipaul actually falls into himself. The notable part here is these writers often pre-dated the feminist and equality movements, which basically means that our perception of the literary elite as male, more often actually reflects the male dominated world in which they wrote: for male readers. Obviously the world has moved on from then, from the mass production of fiction at the turn of the 20^th century to now, the literary elite have been in decline. What has come to be more important than ones craft with words is ones ability to create an entertaining story. No longer are audiences interested in how well ones sentence is constructed, and the breadth and depth of ones vocabulary. As an English teacher in training, I actually find this conflicting. Part of me is elitist you see, part of me values the English language and how it is used and crafted, but part of me loves to watch culture evolve and change, and in the post-modern era high culture is dead.

            Naipaul is probably right therefore in his criticisms of female authors, and probably right in citing their lack of craft. But does it actually matter? Who are the authors that will be considered into the new literary elite in 100 years from now? No doubt it will be the authors who sold well (like Jane Austen did), wrote well, and were able to construct a sentence without the need of much of the new lingo developing in this digital age. What I can say, with confidence, is that the level of craft of female authors is defiantly on the rise, and with females now making up the majority of people who read, authors who write to this audience will emerge, and no doubt many of them will be female, and somewhere, there will be ones who show incredible craft and mastery of the English language. The hope is they move from more sentimental themes and start to challenge the way in which we think and view the society we live in.