Local Girls and women writers

My mum has been trying to persuade me to read Alice Hoffman for EVER and so I borrowed a couple of her novels on Sunday and finished Local Girls last night.

I found it to be fairly uneventful (I'm a big fan of complicated plots and clever twists) but easy to read - in a good way. It certainly evokes a sense of time passing, changing seasons and the effects of tragedy on the family unit.

It's a little book, with a little story and an observant, witty, young narrator. I liked it enough to begin Hoffman's 'The Probable Future' straight after. I read the first couple of pages over breakfast and am already finding myself lured in by the poetic language my mum was banging on about (that was less evident in local girls).

Love reading the work of women. Love reading the work of men, too, but have done far more of that over the years - as men are much more widely published than women. Women, of course, weren't allowed to write until about the 17th century - and even after that - they were still often found hiding behind male pseudonyms. This means the literary canon is still very male-heavy. And so my reading list will remain very female-heavy.

I read an interesting interview with Michele Roberts recently, by Jenny Newman (see here) and when asked if she minded being referred to as a woman writer, she replied:

'When you just say ‘writer’ it's nearly always been signed, unconsciously, as a man. And then you have ‘woman writer’ or ‘Black writer’ or ‘working-class writer’—‘the other’. And of course if you're put in that category of ‘other’ you're going to resent it. I think that's why so many writers I admire and esteem who are women did not wish to be called women writers, had no interest in feminism and didn't want to be in women-only anthologies.

But I think they ended up accepting the status quo, which meant they had to somehow become a bit masculine. I prefer to tackle the issue head-on and say the world is riven by gender division. So I'm quite happy to say I'm a woman writer, though I don't believe in some kind of essentialist notion that by virtue of being a woman you automatically write differently to a man. I feel that denies writerly strategies, writerly sophistication and writerly choices, because there's a certain kind of good, old-fashioned, omniscient narrator that someone of either gender could write. Not all women write in a Kristevan, semiotic way.'

By declaring my desire to focus on the work of women writers - I'm not expecting a different type of literature to that produced by men - but, instead, want to support the work of women that has been, and still is, underrated and largely ignored for far too long.