joanne harris blog post - sexism towards women writers

[WillieWaggledagger]

excellent piece

Thanks for that Willie. Joanne Harris's work makes me swoon with its sense of place. Her work is is so her that the idea of her plagiarising anybody or anything is laughable.

And if drawing folk tales, parables and mythology is plagiarism then the Church of England is in deep deep trouble.

Such an important point made when you transpose that accusation onto male authors.

Drawing on, I meant to write.

That's great.

agree with her totally on women using the term chick lit to marginalise other women's writing. Called someone out on it on these very boards last week. Perfectly interesting and serviceable book covering some dark themes - described as chick lit on the adult fiction boards. It was by a woman and primarily about women but that does not mean chick lit. Any more than books by men and about men are all spy thrillers - why do those books get to be literary fiction and books by women get to be chick lit?

Absolutely enraging. The fact that men don't read certain books doesn't make those books chick lit - it makes them limited in their reading. But heaven forbid we should place the problem exactly where it is.

I'm not that big a fan of Joanne Harris's novels but I think I might have to go and now try again because her blog post speaks so much sense.

Most annoyed at VS Naipaul's comment (daft really, because he is known for being an opinionated arse who has fallen out with lots of other writers) that wmen can't write 'literature' because, you know, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, etc etc. What kind of parallel universe does someone have to live in to think that?

I'm torn about the term 'chick lit'. I personally tend to think of rom coms as 'chick lit' so would never think of any Joanne Harris's novels in those terms. But I can see that writers like Joanne Harris or Kate Atkinson are marketed in a way that suggests their books are somehow not quite proper LITERATURE and 'chick lit' is often used to describe any book written by a woman.