Sheila,
I do see where you are coming from but I still hold a different viewpoint. To me one of the aspects of short story writing is the tremendous vista of 'different' possibilities in time, space, era, environment, class, type, Geography and so on, all of which may feature a variety of characters within the confines of one package.

The creativity aspect embodied in the written characters can be based upon one's own reflection of personal experiences and all that but even more important is the skill in developing characters that are completely foreign to the writer.

I did smile at your last reference to Nick Hornby being too young or perhaps he doesn't empathise sufficiently with women. One school of thought might ask 'What man does?'. However I have found that there are, in reality, few common denominators in the actions, reactions and thinking processes of 'women'. Perhaps I thought this way as a boy but I have found that women are so individual that a man risks life and limb to make assumptions that might 'describe' women as a separate group exhibiting common characteristics. The one area of Life that I think is an exception is the woman's thinking towards babies and youngsters. However you may be right on this point.

Len

I don't think it's a matter of being right or wrong, Len. It's just my opinion, and I agree with Ashlinn because I don't like Nick Hornby's books so I don't try hard enough to see his woman doctor as a woman. He said in an interview I read that he ran the finished book past several women readers to see if she was credible.

When I was younger I thought men and women thought and felt in much the same patterns because I was brought up with sisters so had no point of comparison. Now I think they have very different attitudes and behaviour, although that's too sweeping and obviously there is a wide spectrum.

Yes, I agree the personality of the reader shines through. I'm not a particular fan of Beryl Bainbridge, although I think she writes well. I think she's inclined to whine. I've had to teach a lot of writers and the one I really could see very little merit in was Susan Hill, after having to teach a collection of short stories which were immensely gloomy. Of course, she had some bad things happen to her, and I once saw a play of hers where I enjoyed being scared out of my wits, but I avoid reading her novel. Joyce's short stories, though, I loved because the author's curiosity and celebration of characters and place shine out of all his work.

Oh dear, this is well off the topic. The thing about non-fiction is you don't have to engage your emotions whilst giving it your full attention and you don't lose the plot if you skip. I like reading product descriptions on packaging. For a short while, after watching a Test Match with cricket-mad friends I liked reading newspaper sports columns. Film and book and exhibition reviews are my favourite kind of non-fiction. 'Time Out' is an excellent magazine, second only to 'Sight and Sound', in my opinion.


Sheila

Sheila,

You're quite right. In most cases there are no rights and no wrongs for this invariably gives rise to the need for a definition of 'right' and 'wrong'.

I do like to read the Agony Aunt columns where over the years the readers change from youngster to grandparent but the questions remain almost the same. The answers change but not really to a major degree; these are a lovely reflection on what is and what is not 'acceptable' in a Society or Group particularly on the questions of relationships.

Well, I think we are both now back to the main topic.

Regards,

Len

Sorry, coming to this a bit late.

I actually thought Hornby did a pretty good job of the female POV in How To Be Good!

Here's my list. I've probably mentioned them all before several times on this site.

Dry and Running With Scissors by Augustine Burroughs (crazy, sad and fabulous autobiographies)
Sacred Contracts by Caroline Myss (heavy stuff about spirituality and healing from a scarily intelligent woman)
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (of course)
The Diet Cure by Julia Ross (the best book on healthy eating ever - she's cured alcoholism, depression, eating disorders, etc. with her approach and she's way ahead of bl**dy Gillian McKeith)
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay (Self help classic. A bit cheesy, but simple and it works).

I'm sure there's loads of others I can't remember.

Easy Riders and Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind is on my shelves on the 'to read' pile. Lianne, wow, I'd forgotten Film Art . I had a copy - some b*gger must have stole it!

Cath

Re: gender roles in literature, I personally seem to prefer fictional characters who have something essentially androgynous about them (and I mean real androgyny that goes somehow beyond the dichotomy of the sexes, not just female characters who act like males or vice versa). Take Emma Woodhouse, for instance -- she is a woman with a woman's occupations, but her character and her energy strike me as very androgynous -- and it isn't just because she takes pleasure in wielding power, 'like a man', because I don't feel there's anything particularly masculine about the way she wields that power; she certainly has no inferiority complex about being a woman; she is quite simply a powerful, individual character, and quite impossible to categorise as this or that. Or take almost any of Virginia Woolf's main characters -- Orlando is a bit too obvious, but take for example Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, whose outward roles are consistent with their sexes, but whose minds can't be pinned down as either masculine or feminine -- they could be both and yet they're neither. Muriel Spark's characters are often like that, too, but in a more unsettling way: it's as if the cord that connected them to the shared consciousness of their world had been cut and sexual identity, like conventional morality, no longer seemed real or meaningful to them.

I don't know if I make much sense anymore, but in any case, these androgynous characters ring more true to me -- they seem more human, even when they're not too realistic. I don't mean that the experience of the sexes as polar opposites isn't true, nor that I don't enjoy reading about women or men who experience the world first and foremost as women or men, but for some reason characters who have that element of androgyny thrill me like no other. Perhaps I should say that they seem more human than humans themselves. Their fictional minds are capable of something that the minds of real people are not: of breaking free from their sexual conditioning. And that's exciting, liberating, and strange -- how could Virginia Woolf, who was haunted by her own femaleness, her limitations, and her failures as a woman till the day she died, so perfectly capture a sense of being beyond sex?

That's what I'd like to achieve as a writer. As a woman, I have no idea what it really feels like to be a man, and I don't know if my male characters realistically reflect the male experience at all. But I'd like my characters to reach the point where this no longer matters.

I quite forgot about the actual topic here! Here are a few non-fiction titles that I've enjoyed recently:

Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy
The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron's Daughter by Benjamin Woolley
Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf
1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow by Adam Zamoyski
Defying Hitler: A Memoir by Sebastian Haffner

One non-fiction issue which is interesting me at the moment is when you get a memoir/autobiography, and then a biography of the same person by someone else.

This is something that intrigues me as well, Emma. Especially in the case of writers, who are usually too observant and too 'aware' to idealise themselves, but who use innumerable, subtle little subterfuges from their fictional arsenal to tell the 'truth' on their own terms!

(By the way -- please forgive my curiosity, but are you related to Gwen Raverat? The name Darwin made me wonder...)

Mention of Film Art reminds me of an excellent book I was given as a present recently - '1001 Films To See Before You Die'. Great for people like me who are both film fans like ticking off items on lists.

Christina Stead's Diaries and Letters, ditto Patrick White's, for how difficult it was in the first half of the twenieth century to be a serious writer in Australia. Anything by Germaine Greer for the same, only later. Diaries of Kenneth Williams and, of course, Joe Orton's 'Prick Up Your Ears', Alan Bennett's lettrs and Diaries. Christopher Isherwood's Christopher's Friends, good in parts, but not when he is in America part of the time.I'm not sure of it counts if the áuthors of these nonfiction works are writers. Richard Hoggart, of course. He was Chancellor of Goldsmiths when I was there, or is it Warden? The one everyone was raving about at the time was Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider', but I prefer his later books of theories about murder which grew from the early work.

I don't know enough about the others, but I've reread Jane Austen lately and don't think Emma Woodhouse was very man-like, spending her time in foolish and ill-judged match-making and then having to marry stuffed-shirt Knightley, who was nearer her father's age than hers. Carole Shields Biography of Jane Austen is very good.

Sheila

Sheila

Sheila, the novelist Mary Flanagan regards Emma as a tragedy. Personally I disagree, but I do think it's Austen at her toughest and most uncompromising, like Mansfield Park.

Fredegonde, yes, Gwen Raverat is/was my great-aunt. If you've read Period Piece, my grandfather is her brother Charles.

A terrific writer's memoir I read recently is Elizabeth Jane Howard's. Beautifully written, honest, and also revealing of her in what she says she leaves out, and in what the reader sees that she honestly doesn't. Among other things, of course, she was married to Kingsley Amis.

Emma

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What a clumsy sentence! I mean, revealing in what the reader sees that she honestly doesn't see.

I don't know Mary Flanagan, but I think Austen intended her stories to have happy conclusions. I don't have Emma to hand, but I am dipping into the Carole Shields book on Auaten because my husband has brought it along to read on holiday. Jane Austen's life, of course, may be read as a tragedy if we think of her blighted hopes of marriage to one Mr Lefroy, who didn't actually propose but of whom she felt sufficiently secure to confide in her older sister, Cassandra. Then his family whisked him away, probably fearing a bad (financially disadvantageous) connection.

Yes, the Mansfield Park scenes in Portsmóuth seem to be as near as Jane got to working class life at the time, and it cerainly horrified her. In Emma I can't remembr any such settings, although the Bates are badly off, of course. However, they are not actually reduced to working. Emma, unlike some of the other heroines, is comfortably off. I think, by the way, the depiction of Mr Bennett as some kind of Tom Jones country Squire in the recent film is a gross distortion. In the novel he is bookish, and the reason for his detchment from his family is that he spends most of his time in his library. It's a shame that his witticisms have to be transformed to a kind of manly resignation.

However, this is off the topic. I must google Mary Flanagan.


Sheila

Yes, I agree that Austen means her stories to have happy conclusions, and she doesn't tangle with larger social or political issues - as opposed to her letters, which I gather are full of them. But along the way, most of her people are at least self-deluded, and usually nasty, and the world is a tough place which no-one has a chance of changing, only fitting in worse or better.

Emma

Oh, I think Jane had easy circumstances compared with most women of her time, apart, of course, from not netting herelf a suitable partner when one offered. She was proposd to and turned one down, which rankled somewhat with her mother. She writes about the milieu she knew, of course, which was very narrow, but there are some supportive sisters and brothers as well as happy partnerships. Even Lydia is rescued from ruin.

Sheila

That's what makes Austen so great -- you can interpret her works in so many ways. For my part, I used to dislike Miss Woodhouse, and Emma was my least favourite Austen novel because in terms of romance the conclusion is so unsatisfactory. Nowadays, however, it's my favourite, and I have come to realise that the novel isn't really about 'romance', and Emma herself isn't much of a romantic. I read it as a novel about education. I think Emma is a natural born story-teller, and (in a way) imagination and creative energy personified. She has a desire to do good, and like most people, she has an idea of what society should be like. I don't think there's anything particularly foolish or misguided about her schemes and notions per se. (After all, the reader is usually deluded along with her -- we get the same education. Moreover, the most deplorable aspects of her attitude are ones shared by most of her peers!) She already has the intelligence and the energy; she only needs to learn to empathise with other people and to take into account that they are unpredictable. Once she has learnt this, I don't think she is diminished or subdued, but her energy is re-directed in a more productive way.

Or perhaps I just sympathise because I'm so much like her... (Match-making is one of my dearest hobbies!)

But along the way, most of her people are at least self-deluded, and usually nasty, and the world is a tough place which no-one has a chance of changing, only fitting in worse or better.

It's funny because on one hand, Austen promotes the direction of individual energies towards communal good, but on the other hand, her universe is so chaotic and contradictory and full of solipsism. She seems to believe in conventional morality, but in her world conventional authority figures are not the right people to uphold it (look at all the fathers, clergymen, aristocrats, etc. who are either incompetent or worse). The intelligent men -- like Knightley -- can be reasonable and good, but they're too steeped in their authority and 'wisdom'. I honestly believe that in the end, the educated Emma is much wiser than Knightley can ever hope to be, because she has learnt to understand her own limitations. Though it can be hard to spot, she is from the first willing to listen to other points of view and to readjust her position. Unlike Knightley, who never for a moment seems to doubt that he's right (even when he isn't).

And that's why I believe Austen was a 'feminist' of sorts. In her novels, the educated, intelligent, morally aware female is always the one with most potential to understand her world and become a 'good' person.

Sorry, I know this is off-topic, but I can never pass an opportunity to talk about Austen!

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P.S. EmmaD: wow! I know it's not an 'accomplishment', really, but I do find it exciting when somebody is related to a famous figure from the past... it has something to do with my love of history and continuity, I suppose :)

Fredegonde, I'd never thought of Knightley like that, but it's a very good point. I suppose then that what redeems him from being like all the other not very useful men is that he appreciates Emma's qualities as others don't. I'm not a fan of the novels-as-biographical-clues school of lit crit but you can't help wondering if Austen would ever have found a man up to her fighting weight.

I agree with whoever didn't like the Donald Sutherland Mr Bennet, tho' for me it was because it was such a soppy cop-out to make Mr and Mrs B actually rather fond of each other. That marriage is very bleak, and bleakly portrayed, and Mr B is recognised - by Darcy as well as by Austen - as being as much at fault as Mrs B, in making his scorn of his wife so plain to all.

Oh dear, still off-topic. Dragging this post back to non-fiction by the hair, one of my big non-fiction-haven't-reads is JA's letters, which - even sanitised as they were by her nephew - apparently have everything in them that isn't in the novels, or at least only by inference.

Another non-fiction-haven't-read is Pepys, though I've dipped and loved it. I have let myself of The Origin of Species, BTW Fredgonde.

Emma

Ohh some good books here and here's my contribution:

From this year, I have read some great science books. One in particular is The Elegant Universe. It is a freaky universe with live in, from quantum physics to Einstein's Special Relativity (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375708111/qid=1129818367/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/026-8803861-4195613)

Also, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a great introduction into so many topics that, as a way in, I would recommend people to read that (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552997048/qid=1129818457/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/026-8803861-4195613)

Others I have read this year are In Praise of Shadows (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099283573/qid=1129818509/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-8803861-4195613), which is a short essay on aesthetics, in particular the Japanese aesthetic. Incidently, there is a a few pages on the aesthetic of the toilet which is, actually, quite nice.

Also, Wrong About Japan (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571228704/qid=1129818608/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/026-8803861-4195613) is a good generation gap book about the culture of modern japan and of old Japan.

Ta ra

JA

How much did Amazon pay you James?

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PS Austen was a great writer but let's not get too carried away!