Do you think it's entirely possible for a man to write about a female character to their fullest and vice versa? Is there amount where an author can't quite intellectually grasp the totality of the lives experience of another gender?

[mids2019]

So for centuries authors have written both female and male characters extremely well.Shakepeare, Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Bronte sisters etc. etc.

however I think literature has become more gendered in audience with the advent of chick lit and hyper masculine novels like Jack Reacher with a host of aubiographies from ex SAS/boxer/sportsmen types. I don't actually think this a direction we should go in? I think it's a little worrying that in a typical high store there is now a divergence between 'male' and 'female' literature.

do you think modern authors are becoming a little more reluctant to write in depth characters from the opposite sex as presumably this is more of literary challenge? Is there sterling in modern society that it is authoritative to write about another lender's lives experience in much the same way as writing about a character from another ethnicity may not be construed by some as entirely ethical?

I do hope this isn't the case and authors in general do continue to write about other genders at a dee p emotional leve..

Sorry for the typos....bloody autocorrect

Yes, I think some authors can write other genders quite well. Others not and you can see their ignorance a mile away. Read a John Grisham recently where the main protagonists were all women and they were so badly written. Basic as fuck. Always eating avocado toast and maintaining their lovely figures. Almost rolled my eyes inside out 😂

I've read books before and genuinely not realised the authors are not the same gender as their main protagonist. So I think it can be done (or maybe I'm just an idiot)

I wondered this recently. I read Ian McKewan's Letters (and struggled through it) and what stood out for me is that I felt the women characters were so one dimensional and were just objects that a male was projecting himself onto. Maybe that was the point though. I disliked the book though so there may be more nuances there than I recognised.

I haven’t seen gendered literature areas in bookshops. I mean you have the TikTok table and that’s a big pink and chick-lit, and the non-fiction table which is more whites & greys.

I think authors should write whatever sex, religion, age, profession etc etc they want. Whether that sounds “true” or not is a different matter.

For example, Jane Austen. I like both her male and female characters. I don’t think they have much depth but as a vehicle for her stories they are good.

Remembering the time my (very sweet) fil warned me about a book I'd borrowed because it "isn't a lady book" 🤣

I'm not sure I'd agree about literature becoming more gendered in audience in general tbh. There are obviously certain types of book which are at the extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of being aimed at men or women, but surely there's far more cross-over in between those extremes than there might have been, say, 50 years ago? More men reading books by women, and far more women reading genres not traditionally so popular with women? I'm a 51 yo woman and I'd far rather read something at the masculine end than chick lit!

I think there are certainly male and female authors who write characters of the opposite sex well, but also plenty who don't. I read quite a lot of fantasy (as well as other things) and unfortunately there are quite a lot of male fantasy writers whose female characters are obviously two-dimensional representations of the author's teenage geek fantasy of a woman!

felt the women characters were so one dimensional and were just objects that a male was projecting himself onto. Maybe that was the point though.

This is how I feel about Sebastian Faulks- I’ve never found any of his female characters fully developed but that’s because they’re largely seen through the eyes of his male characters, who struggle to see them as fully human and autonomous. Not sure whether it’s deliberate or making a virtue of necessity.

I’m trying to think of fully formed characters written by the opposite sex. Norma in A Doll’s House? Emma Bovary? Silas Marner? I’ve always found Casaubon a very convincing character as well.

and Adrian Mole 😁

Interesting replies. I get the impression from this thread some male authors can write female characters well and some.....just cant. Is this due to the qualifying the author in a literary sesnse? I wonder to what extent writing becoming more sexually explicit in the last century or so has made it a real challenge for authors to write about the opposite genders experience? I don't think a man can write about such things as childbirth or female sexual experience in a way that can be truly authentic and could end up being badly done.

my personal opinion is that a significant proportion of best sellers are written with a target audience in mind (often gender specific?) e.g. Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Marion Keyes. I think there always has been a cultural assumption that romance is effeminate and romance as a theme is more successful with female readership (obviously wrong but I think there is a that assumption).

One of the reasons I enjoyed reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld books is that I always found his female characters extremely well drawn.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

I agree but I guess his books were meant for a range of ages (perhaps testament to him as an author).

How do you define a well drawn female character?. Is it a character which doesn't fall into obvious stereotypes?

I wonder if a good author is a good author independent of sex and a good author should be able to write for both genders equally well should we be distinguishing between female and male authors at all.now? Is there such a thing as the 'authentic female voice' that needs an audience.

I remember when the whole first unmasking of Robert Galbraith as really JK Rowling happened and a male critic wrote they thought it was odd that Galbraith noted the smell of the gents toilets in a dive pub - because most men wouldn’t even notice that anymore. That he had questioned if it really was a male author after reading that, as seemed like a woman had been allowed to pop into the gents of a particular pub being written about to get the layout and was surprised by the smell.

It seems to be a gift only of a few male authors. Iain M Banks was one; one reason I loved his Culture novels was the presence of female characters who were fully rounded characters - not 'man writing women'

Wilkie Collins is a classic author who could also write great women - interestingly IIRC he lived in a menage a trois situation, so I wonder if being so close to two different women gave him a greater insight than many men of his time.

I think Trollope's female characters are very convincingly written, he has a whole array of independent women - some good, some bad (Lizzie Eustace is one of my favourite heroines).

Also Paul Scott, I found his writing of Sarah Layton in the Raj Quartet is extremely good, but there are many other good female characters in that series.

Wally Lamb’s Delores in “she’s come undone”. To this day I find it hard to believe that character was written by a man - took him 7 years tbf.

Dickens is an interesting case. He created incredible characters but his powers utterly failed him when he wrote about young women. Betsey Trotwood, Flora Finching and so on are proof positive that he could write about women past their first youth in much the same way he wrote about men. Of course, he seems to have had some hangups about women in general, leading to his horrible treatment of his wife and his affair with a very young woman later in life.

(Still one of my favourite authors, though. Very much a case of separating the work from the creator.)

I think Kate Atkinson can do it. I think McEwan does it in Atonement. And Hardy does a beautiful job with Tess for its time.

I immediately thought of Wally Lamb when I saw this. Completely convincing to me.

I think there is enough of a breadth in the experiences and expression of male and female that it should be possible to write a character convincingly when you haven't lived their life - basically most fiction really.

I think men who can't write female characters well, when they're otherwise competent writers, show their own misogyny. They don't really believe that women are full people and write accordingly.

In reverse, the debate in romantic fiction of whether female writers write good male/male romance is interesting. I've read some convincing arguments that the female gaze is always there and these are books written for heterosexual women depicting heterosexual relationships (where the protagonists just happen to be men).

Memoirs of a geisha, but I read it when i was a teen so who knows.

The characters are usually only there to promote the plot so well rounded people may not be necessary. Doesn't matter if the author is male or female often the characters are in many ways stereotypes or there simply to expand some aspect of the plot.

Agree with a pp about Hardy and Tess. I think it does take a very skilled author to write convincingly about an existence they haven’t experienced however it surely takes a huge amount of effort and dedication. Potentially some very talented authors lack the inclination or motivation to really try with this, whether down to unconscious sexism or the fact that they are successful regardless.

One of the best-drawn and believable male characters I know is Newland Archer in Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence." (I'm a man, if that is important here.)

You don't actually need to go into the gents' toilets in a pub to be able to appreciate the smell, you just have to be within about 10 yards of the door.

You mention Jane Austen - she made a point of not writing about male characters unless female characters were present in the scene, as she didn't know how men behaved when only other men were present.

Julian Barnes can do it. There are a couple of scenes in his books where I always feel he must have talked to his wife first. I agree Trollope is good at it, and also Dickens in some cases though not, I think, in Great Expectations or David Copperfield.

I disagree about Atonement, but I really dislike the gender politics in that book.