Collectively, their outsider’s view highlights several important aspects of our literary culture. It confirms, for instance, the international clout of Britain’s biggest book prizes when it comes to promoting novels abroad and cementing reputations. Of the 21st Century titles that made the list, Andrea Levy’s Small Island won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize), and Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth snagged, among other trophies, the Costa Novel Award (then called the Whitbread)
reenex. Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending all won the Man Booker Prize, for which Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane were also shortlisted.
Do women writers’ observations appeal to other outsiders?
Most significantly, though, Britain’s literary landscape appears to be a good deal more female to outsiders than we ourselves appreciate. Why is this? Happily, the sheer range of work by women authors in this poll dooms most attempts at generalisation. There are feminist classics like Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, period pieces such as Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, and books that simply deserve a greater readership – Sybille
reenexBedford’s A Legacy for one. I let out a whoop of joy to see Jane Gardam’s Old Filth at number 71; it’s one of the best evocations you’re likely to read of how Englishness has evolved over the past 100 years – a sheer delight from its shrewd, curmudgeonly beginning to its elegiac end.
Still, it’s possible that some of the criticism traditionally aimed at ‘women’s writing’ stands it in good stead where foreign readers are concerned. The domestic focus and small canvas? Both make for fiction that taps into universal themes such as relationships, children, the rich churn of inner lives.
We shouldn’t forget either that critics were asked to identify the greatest British novels, not merely great novels that happen to have been penned by natives of our island. Could it be that aspects of womanhood – a propensity to find oneself ever the underdog, say – chime particularly resonantly with aspects of our national character, resulting in a distillation of all that readers abroad look for in an authentically British book? A likelier explanation might be that so many generations of women writers have found themselves to be doubly outsiders – by virtue of both gender and creative calling – that their observations appeal to other outsiders.
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