Can men write romance?
An article in The Independent discusses whether men can write romantic fiction. First, there’s a bit about Jane Austen that is not really germane to the subject except as deep background, but it’s quite good so here ’tis:
Later, in its Gothic form, romance discovered the windswept moors and gloomy castles where it still in many places thrives. But when an undisputed genius turned to these much-loved conventions - as Jane Austen did in Northanger Abbey - she sent them up something rotten. A proud author of romances, Sir Walter Scott felt dismayed that Austen (whom he admired) should poke fun at the form. Already, the notion of a rigid gender distinction in fiction that sets romance-minded women against blundering, insensitive males is looking pretty fragile. Austen’s own inspirations, by the way, included the deeply anti-romantic prose of Samuel Johnson, the equally hard-edged poetry of William Cowper, and the wonderfully crisp, clever diarist and novelist Fanny Burney, who should be much more widely read by everyone, regardless of their physical endowments.
The article goes on to talk about various heroines created by men (Becky Sharp, Sophie Aubrey (!), Bathsheba Everdene (!!), etc. We’ll never know what Jane Austen would have said on the matter (though it is fun to speculate) but we do know what her most delightful hero had to say about it.
“I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.”
September 14th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Hmmm, this is going to hurt, because I like Patrick O’Brian and I like Katie Fforde, but I must say that Sophie Aubrey doesn’t really qualify as a heroine. The Aubrey/Maturin novels are all about Jack and Stephen’s friendship and the strains placed on it by their professional relationship. True, they nearly fight a duel over Diana Villiers, but still. Sophie and Diana are both well-drawn characters, but they don’t carry the stories enough to support the particular argument at hand.