Monday 26: "Women, Sex and Fiction"

This panel focused on the relationship between the writers’ identity and the voices they impersonate in their works.    The first question raised by the moderator, Claire Messud, was:  “Does it matter who the writers are?”

Norman Rush answered by giving the example of the reaction caused by his novel, Mating, written from the perspective of a woman.  Many women, he said, found this offensive at the time (that is, about twenty years ago). 

It’s been known since the novel was invented that the imagined readership of fiction has been women, not men. Today, 80% of fiction’s readership is women, yet men seem to be winning all the awards. Yesterday’s event, “The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation,” sought to address this issue. Lorraine Adams, one of the event’s panelists, gave a telling anecdote: after informing one of her Princeton professors that she was going to write her paper on the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, he exclaimed: “Good! Fiction is for women and babies.”

The panel, led by novelist Claire Messud, was largely a response to Messud’s month-long fiction editorship at Guernica, where she prefaced her series with an essay about gender inequality in fiction....