Mslexia autumn 2005
There was a point when judging the Romantic Novel of the Year award this spring when I wanted to throw certain of the shortlisted books against the wall in anger. Not the winner, Katharine Davies’s magical escapism A Good Voyage (since renamed The Madness of Love), or Andrea Levy’s Whitbread winner Small Island. No, the books that made a dent in my paintwork read more like the self-help manuals that litter the “relationship” corner of the mind, body, spirit sections of bookshops. Books akin to Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s The Rules or John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women from Venus, espousing 1950s values that encourage young women to believe that only a husband and family will give them meaning and that work is just displacement activity for the unattached.

When I agreed to chair the judging of the shortlisted novels (See box) I was looking forward to reading about feisty heroines in the mould of Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale, proud, principled women who fight prejudice and adversity to get what they want and win the hearts of a man along the way. I was interested to see how contemporary writers updated these women. Of the six, three fitted most closely the commercial romance label – Erica James’s Love and Devotion, Susan Lewis’s The Hornbeam Tree (a book unable to decide whether it was a mother and child saga or political thriller) and Elizabeth Noble’s The Tenko Club. But instead of bodice ripping they were so concentrated on suffering that I wanted to cry and not for the right reasons.

Yes I know since Ryan O’Neill kissed Ali McGraw goodbye in Love Story, illness and bereavement has provided a rich seam for romance writers, but it should not be the only seam for contemporary writers. Of the three all featured bereavement or illness. Relationships were inevitably sad and stressful rather than supportive. In James’s novel chief character Harriet Swift is forced to drop everything to care for the orphaned children of her sister, while love interest Will is a widower; in Lewis’s The Hornbeam Tree once successful journalist Katie Kiernan no longer works but faces death from cancer and copes with her unruly teenage daughter, the romance is supplied by sister Michelle’s relationship and is less about love and more about Katie’s jealousy; and in Noble’s The Tenko Club yummy mummy Freddie mourns the loss of her father and then her marriage but finds comfort in yet another widower.

Women work to pay the bills until they find some poor sucker to take over the task. The men are invariably stereotypes of virtue or meanness, all of whom are weak and betray a contempt for the sex straight out of the “men are such simple creatures” school of gender studies. Freddie’s philandering and emotionally repressed husband who screws his girlfriend on the golf course is straight out of central casting. Michelle’s journalist lover a hero of such handsome ruggedness is weakened by the realism of the more mundane events happening around him. The men seem emasculated – one male character in James’s book even manages to lose a testicle.

I wondered why women would want relationships with any of these enfeebled men and why they thought relationships with them would be fulfilling. This point was made by a group of 20 male readers from varied backgrounds and aged between 20 and 50 whom I asked to read the shortlist. The younger ones were especially angered by the portrayal of their sex in the commercial fiction. It explained, they felt, why women often had low expectations of men but impossibly high expectations of relationships. One, 25-year old insurance broker George Thompson, said: “Books like these killed my last relationship. My ex-girlfriend was always reading them and saying that our relationship was not like those in the novels she read. So she dumped me.”

The book that finally broke my judicial patience was Noble’s The Tenko Club, in it four friends meet at Oxford University – more finishing school than blue stockinged step onto the career ladder. Of the four (one dies) only Reagan has a career. And wow is she punished for it. A high flying lawyer, any success in the workplace is completely undermined by her emotional meltdown and portrayal as a bitter, self-loathing man eater, envious of friends who have ditched work for smug yummy mummydom and husbands so boring you have to ask why bother in the first place? By the end she is the only one with no resolution having almost destroyed her friendships and jacked in her job in recognition that it will not fill the gaping hole in her life, which of course is relationship-shaped. In contrast the other two women are rewarded for their conformity: one with a shiny new husband-to-be; the other a baby. It is the literary equivalent of the Daily Mail.

I asked a friend who buys fiction for one of the high street book chains if the offenders on the shortlist were typical of what is on offer, he paused for breath before admitting they were. “The male characters have become one dimensional. The novels are populated by feeble cowardly cads or humorless, pseudo-brooding imitations of Darcy, Rochester and Heathcliff,” he observed. “Even worse, in romantic fiction, is the New Man, a throwback to the learned, gentleman of science or penniless vicar of bad historical romance. He is a spineless dreamer who thinks with his head and never his heart. Who wants to see their engaging heroine end up with that?”

Of course, authors and publishers point to the pages of women’s magazines as proof that these books reflect the preoccupations and fantasies of contemporary women. Stratospheric sales of books from Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary to Jane Green’s The Other Woman seem to back the claim that that readers identify with the characters. Within a week of sale Cecelia Ahern’s Where Rainbows End was only outstripped by Dan Brown in the book charts, shifting a very respectable 40,000 copies, according to chart compiler Nielsen BookScan. The same is true of Adele Parks’s hen lit title Husbands, which this year sold 35,401 in its first week of sale. As for The Tenko Club, it sold over 62,000 in its first month of sale in January.

If this were a mere numbers argument these sales would win the case. But my concern is not just about numbers. It is about pandering to prejudice and encouraging women to expect fulfilment from too narrow a base. A survey of 5,000 teenage women by CosmoGirl found that 97% of them disagreed with the statement that it did not matter who was the main earner as long as you are happy. Instead 85% of them said they would rather rely on their partner to support them than be an independent woman. Have we so easily forgotten why our mother’s fought for equality?

Of course contemporary romance cannot be held responsible for the destruction of feminism, but the lack of positive single and professional role models cannot help when much of it is saying that women only work to while away the time before our White Knight arrives. If we constantly peddle an image in contemporary literature that it is realistic to expect total fulfilment from a relationship alone and which promotes a view of men as either perfect heroes or evil idiots, we are setting up women to fail. “Get a man and be happy, and if you are not, well what did you expect? All men are idiots aren’t they?” is the message. No responsibility on our part, no right to fight for anything more. No wonder divorce rates among those in their late 20s are the highest of any age group according to the latest government data (30 relationships in 1,000 end in divorce among this age group).

There is an almost bipolar attitude to romance among publishers. While they encourage their authors to challenge the stereotyping of their writing in their publicity, their advertising more often than not pumps out the same sexist stereotype of men. Despite the fact that the author gave copious interviews saying her latest book was about women in the workplace, the campaign for Marian Keyes’s The Other Side of the Story ran with the tagline: “Girls! There is someone who will never let you down in bed.” Who might that be? Why Marian of course, “funny, honest, reliable” the posters declared with a knowing wink. If Marian was trying to say something more than “boy’s suck” then it was lost in the ad copy.

What is strange to me is that these stereotypes persist in a world that has produced contemporary heroines as varied as Ellen MacArthur, mountaineer Annabelle Bond or the bereaved mothers bravely protesting against gun crime. When did our romantic heroines become so needy? It is usual in articles like this to blame poor old Bridget Jones. Being adept at riding band wagons rival publishers quickly cashed in on the niche opened up by Helen Fielding’s comic creation with a flood of City Girl novels in which the heroines spend their time worrying about boyfriends, measuring their thighs and getting drunk with mates, only to be rescued by a nice chap to take home to mother by the final chapter.

Now watch my lips: Bridget Jones’s Diary is a satire. A satire! Not a handbook. It was never meant as a template for modern womanhood, as Fielding’s editor at Pan Macmillan, now Zadie Smith’s agent, Georgia Garrett points out. “It was not meant to be an authentic picture of womanhood. It is a comic creation,” she explains. “The film made her more of a klutz, but in the book Bridget’s take on things is very acerbic.” Bridget’s success made her a news story and, says Garrett, it was when the media began showing an interest that the misconceptions about the book crept in. “The commentating about Bridget became detached from the actual book. It seemed obvious that most of the commentators had not read the book.”

That the hacks used it to announce a trend implies that there was something going on in the early 1990s that chick lit tapped into, a point made by Louise Moore, publishing director of Michael Joseph. Moore helped pioneer the genre with Marian Keyes and Jane Green and is widely regarded as one of the most astute publishers of commercial women’s fiction in the country. Looking back she says these authors caught her eye because of the freshness of their voices and the sense that they were writing about a group of women overlooked in the novels of the older, posher bestselling authors Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope or the ballbusters in the boardroom and bedroom created by Jackie Collins.

“Their voice, humour and immediacy stood out,” she recalls. “They were not like pieces of fiction. They communicated directly with the women who were likely to be reading the books. It was a voice that I knew younger women would relate too.” And they did: chick lit authors immediately outperformed other genres, commanding writers such as Chris Manby, Fiona Walker and Jenny Colgan sizable advances. As these women grew up, married and moved to the country, so did their writing. Gone is the hunt for a husband in its place is a struggle to keep one, find another or have a baby– in Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Ties The Knot personal shopper Rebecca Bloomwood plans two weddings to the perfect Luke Brandon; in Adele Parks’s Husbands Bella struggles to make her mind up about divorce and marrying charming catch Philip; while in Sophie King’s The School Run, Harriet waits for her husband to tell her whether their marriage is on or off.

The passivity of these heroines disturbs me, and I think it is about time we had a different kind of literary heroine to light up our reading matter. One who offers more positive role models to young women. I am not alone in this desire, author Kate Mosse agrees: “I really do resist the idea that it is ALL about finding a man. Relationships are one of the many things that women might be interested in, in the same way that men are interested presumably in finding the right partner too. I don’t think it needs to be the sole motivation for characters.”

Mosse felt so strongly about the monochrome portrayal of women in much commercial fiction that she placed two adventurous women at the heart of Labyrinth, her bestselling novel about the hunt for the Holy Grail. Though the book has undoubtedly benefited from the sales’ slipstream created by Dan Brown’s grail quest blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, the two heroines featured in the time slip novel – a modern archaeologist and a 12th Century Cathar – are refreshingly unencumbered by relationship baggage. The relationships they have with men are supportive, romantic and equal. Mosse adds: “I get frustrated that a lot of commercial fiction seems to be old fashioned from a female perspective and is all about finding Mr Darcy and being ‘happy ever after’. Yes I want my female characters to have great sex and love lives, but I don’t want that to be the sole purpose of their story.”

Labyrinth appeared shortly after Elizabeth Kostova’s Dracula-inspired The Historian, which also features two female protagonists. Of the two the mother Helen Rossi is the most interesting. A cool intellectual in search of her father, she presents a refreshing antidote to the stereotype of maternal love. Kostova explains the inspiration for Helen’s character: “There are many women in my family, especially older women, who are strong, intellectual and inspiring. I wanted to show the kind of courage that these women can rise to.”

There are other heroines who rise to that kind of courage – Caroline Carver’s ecological thrillers all feature heroines for whom the hunt for a man is secondary to everything else. In her latest Beneath the Snow (out 15th September) Abby McCall searches out her scientist sister Lisa in the Alaskan wilderness. Adventurous heroines, once the fantastical creations of science fiction, are moving mainstream. What we need is for a few more of kick ass females to kick the romantic heroes into touch.

Publishers defend the portrayal of relationships as traumatic and women as victims, claiming it is what women want to read to help them cope with the stresses in their own lives. Louise Moore says: “Women’s fiction is always going to be about emotion because women are very emotional creatures by and large even if they are successful in the workplace,” she argues and adds: “How many women in therapy are talking about these things? Relationships are a preoccupation of women.”

Well, not for all women, relationships are only one of many things on their mind. “Women come into therapy for many, many reasons,” counters therapist Kate Nowlan, chief executive of Counselling for Companies, part of the respected charity WPF, which provides counselling and training for therapists. “They come because they have got stuck in life. They come because they are bored. They come because they are having emotional crises, which can be caused by relationships but aren’t necessarily. Even then, once they start to peel away the layers, it isn’t necessarily the relationship that is the problem.”

Nowlan like Mosse believes contemporary romance masks something more sinister in the situation of young women in our society. “I am really struck by the isolation of younger women now,” she says. “They may live alone but their dream is that prince charming will arrive and rescue them. It is hard.” The pressure on women to have it all has created a need to escape through older romantic archetypes, but the danger is that by constantly having these ideals placed in realistic contemporary settings women are being given unrealistic expectations that will lead to disappointment, she adds.

This, she believes, also explains why crime writing, which has long featured contemporary women in the workplace, is popular among women. Often these women become hunted, their vulnerabilities and lack of life beyond the job exposed by their quest for the killer, who is usually committing appalling acts of violence against women. Nowlan believes the books are catharsis through which women can vent their rage in a society intolerant of female aggression. “What do women do about their own violent feelings?” she asks. “That is what they are reading these books for. It ties up with chick lit in a rather interesting way. One is frothy and the other dark and abrasive, both are escapist. Like the Madonna and whore archetypes: women are expected to be virginal and good, but if there is nowhere where they can be angry, despairing and express their frustration or violence, they will read a book that expresses that for them.”

It could be argued that the role models provided for women in crime are as unhealthy as those in chick lit. But it is not that simple, as Hodder publishing director Nick Sayers points out: “The convention of the crime novel is for characters who are sad, lonely and unfulfilled and who become hunted. The male detectives are also portrayed like that.” From Ian Rankin’s Rebus to Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan, the gender of the hero in crime is not the issue, says Maria Rejt, Colin Dexter’s editor at Pan Macmillan. “It is a convention in crime, look at Morse, though I must admit that I get a bit sick of it now.”

One area in which romantic heroines are allowed to be feisty and have careers that mean something is historical romance. Whether the literary love affairs of Sarah Waters or the clogs and shawls heroines of Lyn Andrews and Josephine Cox, though the latter’s bestsellers focus on coping heroines dealing with weak men. The market appeals to older readers, ones who fought those battles to get into the workplace.

Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times, believes that contemporary novels focus on the mundane trauma of relationships rather than romantic pursuit for two reasons. They are fantasies for women who want to escape the drudgery of every day life, but their contemporary setting means that they have to be anchored in something that at least gives a semblance of reality. “Maybe it is part of the domestic goddess backlash,” she says. “We all tend to have careers now, so we fantasise about making cup cakes.” She recalls the films of the 1930s and ’40s such as His Girl Friday in which feisty career women slugged it out with men in the workplace. “You could argue that was a different form of escapism,” she explains. “My grandmother was a successful career woman in the 1940s in New York. Back then that was very unusual and strange for my mother to explain to her friends, no one else could imagine what it was like.” So just as Rosaling Russell’s depiction of newspaper girl go-getter Hildy Johnson was a fantasy for women mired in domesticity in the ’40s, so the handsome prince who rescues the Bridgets, Sophies, Harriets and Emmas that populate chick and hen lit are fantasies for the over-worked women of the Noughties.

There are signs that publishers have overestimated women’s desire for Sir Lancelot to rescue them and that they have underestimated the intelligence of readers. The biggest indicator of this is the success of the Richard and Judy Book Club, whose choices last year accounted for one in every 50 books sold. When the daytime chat show announced it would be following Oprah Winfrey’s example in the States there was considerable scepticism in the book trade that the show would deliver sales on anything but schlock – after all, said the cynics, isn’t the show watched by people without lives – stay at home mums, students, the retired and the unemployed? These are the viewers, but they have lives and do not want to read trash, as Richard and Judy clearly realised.

As with Oprah in the States, which delivered stratospheric sales for difficult books such as Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the British show proved that a slot once perceived as strictly down market could deliver on literary writing. Sales of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas topped 150,000 immediately after it won the Richard and Judy Book of the Year. Auriol Bishop, marketing director at Mitchell’s publisher Hodder & Stoughton, agrees that the complexity of the books chosen for Richard and Judy has challenged publishers’ perception of women readers and the breadth of their reading. “What has changed is that companies have realised that readers are not two dimensional clones from the pages of a marketing handbook,” she says.

Bishop also believes the generational tide is finally turning and the books that appealed to young women in the narcissistic ’90s are less relevant to the new generation of young women, which is why characters like Caroline Carver’s heroines and Jodi Picoult’s morally conflicted heroine in My Sister’s Keeper are finding an audience with them and sales of chick lit are falling. “These women have grown up in a different environment,” she asserts. “They didn’t grow up as Thatcher’s children. They grew up in the ’90s and are more environmentally and socially aware than I was when I was 21.”

If Bishops’ instincts are right it means publishers are missing a market and should be spreading the net more widely for books featuring a new kind of contemporary romantic heroine, ones less self-obsessed and needy than the Ally McBeal stereotypes. Otherwise we are going to encourage yet another generation to give up on the victories won by their grandmothers to be able to find fulfilment in more places than the home. Let’s face it, it is now three years since the anorexic singleton lawyer who epitomised chick lit heroines disappeared from tv screens. She was axed because her audience dropped by 30% among 18 to 34 year olds. Women had become bored. The same happened to me reading romantic fiction this spring, which is why it is time Ally’s siblings disappeared from the bookshelf as well.