Books by men with female main characters...

[TrilllianAstra]

... what do you think?

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.