On Reading More Male Writers Again

I just realized that the last three novels I read were all by male authors. That realization made me reflect on how I have fluctuated over the years regarding the gender of novelists whose works I have read. Like everyone else of my age (Baby Boomer), in school and in college days I read mainly male authors, with a few notable exceptions (Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, Cather, and a few more recent female novelists); they were the ones considered the “best”; they formed the “canon.” Not only were most of the novelists male, but most of their main characters were male as well. I, like most female readers then, had to do what some feminist literary critics later described as suspending reality in order to identify with the mostly male main characters of most novels. But along with the women’s movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a glorious increase in novels (and short stories and poetry and plays) by women writers being published. For the avid reader I was, this development was manna from heaven. For many years afterward, I read mostly works by women, with women as the main characters. Now that there are as many women writers being published as there are men (although there is still the issue of how seriously women writers and “women’s topics” are taken; see my posts of 8/26/10, 9/4/10, and 9/15/10), I have gradually, in the past few years, begun reading more novels by male writers again. This has not been a conscious decision, as much as a natural evening-out process. Also, I give much credit to the women’s movement, not only for the increased number of novels by women being published, but for the fact that the worlds of women and men are now less separate than they were, and therefore the subject matters and styles of novels by males and females are less different, more overlapping than they were. I still read many more women writers than men, but the proportions are less starkly different than they were for a long time.