Books by men with female main characters...

Can't think of any to add at the moment. I never was 100% sure of what to make of Gaiman's writing of women in his adult fiction range.

I believe it was Virginia Woolf (although I may be mistaken, was a quote scribbled down mid lecture) who said that a good writer should be androgynous (in their writing style). It's something I always find myself thinking about when I read these days.

I like Patrick Gale's books. I think he said once in an interview that he had been accused of writing in a misogynist way, but I can't see why (and haven't read any criticism of him that makes such an accusation).

I think Patrick Gale is fairly unaware of misogyny, and so I think he unintentionally writes realistically about how women might be in a parallel universe that wasn't particularly sexist. As such, I enjoy his books as fantastical escapism.

I think a writer should be able to write outside what they know, but I think generally it doesn't seem authentic.

I find it a bit cringey when you have a writer writing from the persepective of someone suffering from gender/racial discrimination and what it feels like.. when a quick flip to the back of the cover shows that they have probably haven't a real clue.

Sebastian Faulkes does a good job ('on green dolphin street' springs to mind).

StewieGriffinsMom - can you really be saying that Kingsley is less misogynist than Martin?! Some of the vilest stuff about women I have ever read has been in Kingsley Amis novels. There was one in particular which I refuse to dignify by remembering its name ([man's name] and the women, or something) which I threw in a bin outside Oxford Circus rather than pass it on to a charity shop or something, thinking that the fewer people read it the better. Yes, Lucky Jim is hilarious but the tip of the iceberg in terms of the depth of his loathing and contempt and simultaneous greedy selfish need for women, as things to use.

Martin - now yes, one of the most interesting questions is to what extent his genius (he has some I think) is flawed by that hatred. (I thought about writing an essay on it once and realised it would depress the hell out of me, so wrote it about what a brilliant book Mating, mentioned upthread, is instead.) I think at the heart of it is a pornographic sensibility: not necessarily literally, but a sense that authenticity somehow requires degradation.

Agree that hatred is an awful limitation in a writer, and awful shutter against empathy. Haven't read Martin Amis, but surely Kingsley was an awful misogynist too? I've only read Lucky Jim, but I felt angry reading that (as well as laughing hard).

Actually Tolstoy has just fallen inot my head as someone who raises these issues strongly. He doesn't feel hatred, but he is monumentally judgemental of his famous female character, in a religious/moralistic way that is surely obstructive of empathy. But a key thing here, I think, is that it is himself that he judges, above all others? He is incredibly hard on himself, his desires, and that inhibits his empathy with all of his characters, despite his being so very brilliant.

Actually, Phillip Pullman does well with the Sally Lockhart books as well, speaking of northern lights

I always hold northern lights up as a brilliant piece of cross gender writing, even though Lyra is not an adult. I think there are some passages where Philip Pullman really captures the feeling of being an adolescent girl, one about feeling like a cup ready to overflow particularly sticks in my mind.

The other author that I thought did amazingly well was John Marsden. Again, they are books for teenagers really but it's a series written from the POV of a teenage girl and I just love it. He worked as a secondary teacher I believe, though, so it stands to reason he would have a good understanding of the female teenage brain!

vezzie, sounds like an interesting book! Will look it up.

I think a man writing as a women or a white person writing as someone black is always going to be more problematic than the other way around because of the power relationships. I also wonder if the dispossessed are a bit more observant when observing the powerful than vice versa.

I struggle with male writers writing from a female perspective fairly often, but DH always moans about females writers, too.

An astonishingly good example of success at this is Mating by Norman Rush. Chandon, yes, she does have a messy period! Typically, during one of the most difficult conversations of her life. Funny how that often seems to happen.

It's written in the first person by a female American anthropologist in Botswana. Does that sound off-putting? It is brilliant.

I could talk about this book all day. I would love the book club to discuss it, partly because I would love everyone I know (and don't know) to read it, and an excuse to read it again myself.

Patrick Gayle and Mike Gayle (no relation) I think write female characters very well.

Trillian - absolutely

Robert Heinlein seemed to think he could 'write' women; read quite a few of his books in my early teens until I realised that the women were all just manifestations of his sexual fantasies. I look back on them with horror.

Is writing across gender essentially harder than other examples of the writer's need to make an empathetic projection into someone not him/herself? I'm not sure. Possibly it is. But that projection is so important to what reading and writing novels is about that I'd hate the thought of problematizing it too much in the case of gender.

Atonement pops into my mind as an example of a very successful piece of cross-gender writing, and I'm sure there are lots of others. An example of it that I hated was Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, which I think at one point has the female character loooking in the mirror and thinking how goddamned sexy she is, in a way that just felt like the male writer allowing his perception of her to be presented as her own self-perception.

Actually, perhaps that's what does make men-writing-women especially hard: our society institutionalises men's projection onto women of men's own desires. To take the most horrible examples, when men see a woman as attractive and call her a whore, or when men feel frustrated by a woman and call her a cockteaser, they are misperceiving something relational (their reaction to her) as something intrinsic in her; they don't see her they see themself in her.

That is a reduction of women to (a small subset of) their relational properties rather than something 'in and for itself', and so the creation of a fictional woman in a male novelist's imagination is more likely to fail to generate something plausibly autonomous?

I still want male novelists to attempt it though.

I think Amis is a woman hater too Tortoise.

It is an interesting subject. I really disliked The Other Hand as well. I felt it was really arrogant for a white English man to assume the voice of a black Nigerian woman. But then it's a bit ridiculous if no one can write outside of their own experience. I think Richard Ford actually writes women very well and not as if he's SHOWING OFF how well he knows women.

variable. too often in crime fiction the female protagonist is drop dead gorgeous/very keen to sleep with the dysfunctional male borderline alcoholic detective protagonist.

I lovce the Tiffany Aching series from Terry Pratchett - Tiffany is a true hero./

I'm very wary of books written by men with a female POV, although some of the above are pretty good. Douglas Kennedy gets it right in some of his, although not all (actually, in A Special Relationship, it was the male character that I found utterly unbelievable). I don't think they're either all good or all bad enough that I could generalise about how I felt, though. Usually the ones who get it wrong, it's not so much that they get a particular thing wrong, as much as the character doesn't feel really properly developed; she's just doing things, one after another.

Actually, much as I like Ben Elton's books, the only one where I liked the female POV was Inconceivable, and I think he probably spoke to his wife a LOT about that before writing it. Most of his female characters, even the ones who are main characters, are just vehicles for the plot.

Steviesmith, do you get the feeling that Martin Amis actually just really hates women, and tries (badly) to disguise it by writing 'unreliable narrator' misogynists all the time? I do.

The Sopranos by Alan Warner

Not about women as such, but teenage girls. Apparently he gad a very close relationship with his little sister. But still I can't understand how a man could so accurately portray what it's like to be part of a friendship group of adolescent girls.

In general I don't think there is any particular issue with writing characters of another gender, but the world of teenage girl friendships is utterly closed to boys. How could he know so well what it's like?

some things men don't get is female sexuality, it never chimes with me. They make weird assumptions, such as women getting turned on enormously by the sight of a cock, any cock. I think this is NOT how most women get turned on. It is male fantasy. This is just a small example.

also, these women NEVER have a (messy)period.