Why women read fiction: Is it a women's domain?

Johanna Thomas-Corr reviews Helen Taylor, Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives, in The Guardian, Sat 7 Dec 2019 .

Damian Barr, author and founder of the Literary Salon in London, thinks that reading can still be a “rebellious and dangerous activity” for women. “There are men who still find it threatening and dangerous when a woman picks up a book,” he says. When he interviewed Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, for his salon, he was appalled at the abuse she had received for talking about novels. “People would say that reading fiction is not important, she should be running the country. Why is reading less valuable to a leader than, say, playing golf?”

This goes some way to explaining the depth of feeling expressed by the women surveyed in a new book by Helen Taylor, Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives (Oxford University Press). Taylor, emeritus professor of English at the University of Exeter, surveyed more than 400 female readers to see how they relate to fiction. The responses are striking in their violence and intensity, in the sin and guilt associated with reading, as well as the defiance. One mother described how she tells her family that she is going downstairs to sort the laundry just so she can steal 10 precious minutes with a novel. Another wrote that for her, reading novels was “fractionally less important than breathing, but only just”. Others fear being caught in the act.

The idea that fiction is a female domain is taken for granted by most people involved in books. According to Nielsen Book Research, women outbuy men in all categories of novel except fantasy, science fiction and horror. And when men do read fiction, they don’t tend to read fiction by women, while Taylor claims that women read and admire male novelists, rarely making value judgments.

It's been this way for several centuries:

The history of fiction has always been a history of women readers. From the 18th century, the novel itself was aimed at a new class of leisured women, who didn’t receive formal education in science or politics. The male writers and critics who wrote and appraised the first novels legitimised the form, but Taylor says they “were quickly overtaken by women writers of sensation and romance fiction. Women took to it as a way of learning about other lives, fantasising about their own relationships and narratives that allowed them to challenge their own subordinate position to men.”

Though there have been histories of women’s reading, Taylor’s spirited, engaging study is the first that tries to capture how fiction matters to contemporary women of different ages, classes and ethnic groups. She says that when she tells men the title of her book, they get defensive. “They say, ‘But I read fiction too!’ I say, ‘I’m sure that’s true, but far fewer men do.’ When I scratch beneath the surface to find out why they have read a certain novel, they never give me an emotional answer. It’s always: ‘Well, it’s because I’m very interested in stories about the first world war or the Victorian period.’ Or they say they did history at university and want to follow up certain ideas. Or that they quite like to read Martin Amis because his characters are funny.”

"Sweets" vs. "roast":

William Thackeray called fiction “sweets” – to ensure a balanced diet, he also recommended “roast”, by which he meant nonfiction. It’s surprising how enduring these puritanical associations have proved; fiction is still seen as “a slippery slope to idle self-indulgence”, as Taylor has it. One of her correspondents wrote: “having an affair is dangerous, masturbation requires solitude and privacy. Reading a book offers both without anyone noticing.” Some readers are less restrained. Taylor’s book includes Pierre-Antoine Baudoin’s 1760 painting, La Lecture (The Reader), which depicts a young woman apparently masturbating with one hand while stroking the pages of a novel with the other.

Reading groups:

The contemporary book group can trace a lineage back to 17th-century Bible study groups, 18th-century Parisian salons, as well as progressive suffrage groups where women have gathered together to self-educate. The sharing of reading is “something women undoubtedly do automatically in ways that are inter-generational, gregarious and collegiate,” says Taylor. [...]

Kate Mosse, novelist, playwright and founder director of the Women’s prize for fiction, suggests that book clubs provide an excuse for women to spend guiltless time with their female friends. “[It] has a sense of there being a purpose to it – it’s not simply leisure – so women allow themselves to take time out of day-to-day life.” Women also use books to gauge one another’s aptness for friendship. “For me, if someone doesn’t value Wuthering Heights (or thinks it overblown, or baggy, or too wild), then I like them just a tiny bit less.”

Sharmaine Lovegrove, publisher of Dialogue Books, recognises that women’s book groups often act as “gatekeepers of our culture”. [...]
It’s striking how many women in Taylor’s book talk about fiction giving them social mobility. A lot of her correspondents described themselves as having come from working-class or poor backgrounds where there were no books in their house, but through libraries, schools, friends and extended family, they had pulled themselves up. Being accepted as a good reader has long been one of the ways for women to achieve greater social status, Taylor says.

Friends:

Emotional intelligence is something of which women are rightly proud. A woman will often be called upon to play the family peacemaker, to ease social relations, to mediate friendships. She might find in Emma Woodhouse or Dorothea Brooke, say, instructive examples.

Taylor feels this needs to be celebrated along with the ways in which women share the fiction that warms, comforts and sustains them. I ask Coe whether he sees marked differences in the way men and women respond to his novels. “Female readers in the signing queue will sometimes tell you directly how much a book has moved them, whereas male readers will say how much they share my enthusiasm for obscure bands like Hatfield and the North,” he says. “But I think, essentially, they are saying the same thing: it’s just that men sometimes need these proxies, these intermediaries – football, music, etc – as a way of voicing their emotions.”

H/t 3QD.