Elaine Showalter has an entertaining essay about literary feuds in her review of Bradfords Literary Rivals: If Bradford knew more about women writers, he could cite many more precedents. Elizabeth Robins was among the 19th-century British novelists who took shots at the (to them) infuriating eminence of George Eliot. In her pseudonymous novel George Mandeville’s Husband (1894), Robins called Eliot “abnormal,” to be “pitied than blazoned abroad as example and excuse.” But Robins also ruefully admitted that “to sit down daily to the task of being George Eliot, and to rise up the ‘average lady novelist’ to the end must… be a soul-tragedy of no mean proportion.” American women writers could be covertly treacherous to their closest friends. Katherine Anne Porter denounced Josephine Herbst as a communist informant to the FBI. And Elizabeth Hardwick wrote a nasty pseudonymous parody of Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group in the New York Review of Books, while congratulating her in a personal letter on a “tremendous accomplishment.” ... The most effective recent literary feud in the US was the 2010 attack launched by best-selling commercial novelists Jennifer Weiner and Jody Picoult against the gendered double standards of reviewing. They singled out the celebration of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom by the New York Times and Time magazine, while women’s fiction treating similar themes was disdained as “chick lit.” As Weiner explained, “it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book—in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention.” Picoult pointed out the unfairness of giving so much space to a male writer when review space was shrinking, and none at all to popular women writers. “There are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction rather than [the New York Times] making the blanket assumption that all commercial fiction is unworthy.” The squabble, which became known as the “Franzenfreude” affair, received enormous media coverage. There was a lot of criticism of Weiner’s self-promotion and “whining,” but her intervention had a big impact, not least of all on the New York Times Book Review, which, under a new woman editor, has expanded its range, and has reviewed or interviewed both Weiner and Picoult.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 16:00:16 +0000
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