Gender Differences in Fiction by Ferdinand Mount, Editor of The Times Literary Supplement

When he was running Duckworth, the late Colin Haycraft, that brilliant, cantankerous publisher, used to say: 'I only publish novels by women now. Men can't do novels any more, they are only good for writing thrillers.' At the time this remark annoyed me, being more or less a man and incurably given to writing novels. But now, six years after his death, I begin to understand what he means. When I first noticed the symptoms, I wondered whether it was simply a passing phase or a mild allergy declaring itself rather late in the day, like an intolerance of dairy products. But the thing has become so strong that I can't go on pretending it isn't there.

The truth is that the modern novels I read with real, deep pleasure are almost all written by women. In the old days, from Fielding through to VS Naipaul (or, if you prefer, from Madame de Lafayette to Virginia Woolf), the sex of the author was a matter of indifference to me. If they were any good, male and female novelists used to give the same satisfaction. Today, by contrast, I find it is usually possible to get through the latest book by the world's famous living male novelists - let's say Saul Bellow, Mario Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Jose Saramago, Salman Rushdie - and admire the fertility of invention, the dazzling display of tricks, the riffs and cadenzas, the language, the energy. When books by these writers and their like are being discussed, I join in heartily: "Oh, absolutely brilliant, I loved that bit where he's in this strange hotel in Boston and his ex-wife appears in the rubbish chute."

But the pleasures I derive from most such novels have a tinny, mechanical quality The sound effects make you jump, but that's all they do. The characters hop about like clockwork toys, running into things, bouncing off them, or disappearing over the edge - I don't care which, and the author doesn't seem to much either. The book may be, as the blurb says, 'challenging'; but rather in the way that your in-car electronics are challenging: if you read the manual very carefully, you may get the hang of it in the end, but you still can't quite see the point.

By comparison, novels by women tend to make less noise, but the books go deeper and last longer in my mind. They often choose a smaller, more domestic compass, but this only intensifies their art. At one time recently, I found I was reading nothing but fiction by Canadian or near-Canadian women: Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, E Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley. And what characterises the Canadian voice, as compared with American or British accents, is its very lack of offensive edge, its soft inviting timbre. Once you accept the invitation, your path may be cunningly strewn with broken glass, but the whole experience tends to be subtler, more conversational, more interior.

Like all writers, women novelists have their faults. Carol Shields can lapse into whimsy, Anita Brookner repeats herself, Beryl Bainbridge can be a bit sketchy, Hilary Mantel can be a little flat. But even when they are below their best, I find my engagement is closer, my sympathy more alive. When I went on holiday last month, what did I take? The latest Brookner and Atwood, Jane Hamilton, Zadie Smith.

There are exceptions to the rule, in both directions. The sort of ingenious women writers whom men often admire - Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter - I cannot get on with at all. And there are a very few male novelists who can awaken a comparable sympathy in me - John Updike or Richard Ford in America, for example, Ian McEwan or Piers Paul Read in England or, among Irish writers, John McGahern and William Trevor. But I choose to regard these as honorary hermaphrodites, in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Evelyn Waugh. At a more modest level, that is the category I hope to squeeze into myself.

What is the explanation? It is not because I have a weakness for soppy, sentimental stories. On the contrary, my favourite women writers tend to the bleak in their outlook. Nor is it because I have a preference for the woman's point of view, if such a thing could be said to exist. Nor do I have a particular curiosity about 'what women want'.

It is true that women tend to write more and better about women, just as men write more and better about men. But it is not the balance of the subject matter that attracts me. And it isn't even because I think women are somehow deeper, more in touch with the life force. Following in the foot-steps of Jane Austen, many of my favourite women writers are decidedly dry and down-to-earth.

No, the reason, as far as I can understand it, is to do with what one thinks the novelist's art consists in - with what novels are or ought to be. The modern male novelist (henceforth MMN) prizes formal ingenuity, tricksiness, exuberance; flights of fancy and fireworks, that's what his genius specialises in. No doubt as he goes along he hopes to tell us something, whether obliquely or in your face, about the Modern Predicament or the Hell that is America. But MMN expects to be awarded more of his marks for technical merit than for artistic impression; or, rather, it is his technical merit that overwhelmingly creates the artistic impression.

The female novelist, by contrast, follows the approach that FR Leavis characterised as the Great Tradition: that is to say, that the novel at its best creates a sort of moral poetry, in that the questions of human choice and of how life is to be lived are intrinsic to it.

Of course, a truly satisfying novel will include all sorts of other things - vivid imagery, funny and touching and disgusting scenes, memorable characters - but without a moral liveliness running throughout the book it will be somehow empty. It's not like a painting or a piece of music; it's not even like a poem. The relation to life is different.

Music's raw material is resonance and the intervals between notes; the novel's material is motivation and the intervals between people. Poetry can deal in single moments, the effect of light upon water or windowsills; but novels must deal in consecutive movements and the effect of people upon one another. It is a social and hence, in some measure, a narrative art, because what people do or don't do to one another has consequences which must be followed through. However cunningly disguised, there is a story in there somewhere. To get rid of the consequences and make your text free-flowing, arbitrary and timeless is to discard what is most interesting.

I don't, of course, mean that a novel should preach a moral line or be read as a tract against some social abuse. There are famous novels that do preach - Uncle Tom's Cabin against slavery, The Forsyte Saga against property and in favour of divorce - but it is partly because of their preachiness that they don't come close to the highest class: to the level of Huckleberry Finn or Anna Karenina. You could say that Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the most wonderful first novel published in 20 years, is about immigrants in Willesden, but it is no more a contribution to the race-relations industry than War and Peace is to military history.

But what the novel does have to do is stay grounded in reality, to convey the weight of life and the difficulty - occasionally the exhilaration - of choosing and carrying on. That doesn't mean realism in a plodding sense; some of the saddest moments in modern fiction are sketched in with a couple of strokes. But what is indispensable is a certain quality of sympathy with the characters and their dilemmas. Even when raucously exposing his or her character's absudities, the novelist must convey some fleeting sensation of what it would be like to be them. In the best fiction, you shed a tear for the monsters too, for Casaubon in Middlemarch, for Karenin, for Captain Grimes.

In all the modern writers I like, even the most caustic ones - especially the most caustic ones - this quality of moral sympathy comes as naturally as a shiver on a cold night. It isn't an effect that they have striven for, and it isn't in the slightest bit sentimental. They simply take if for granted that this is how you write novels, just as George Eliot and Tolstoy took it for granted.

By contrast, in the case of the MMN, it seems as if this moral sympathy is gradually being bred out of them, so that in the most extreme cases their work feels almost autistic. Far from becoming increasingly sensitive and touchy-feely, the New Man seems to be running short of a female chromosome or two. All the hard work that went into making men understand that their lives would be infinitely richer if they encouraged the female side of their natures has had the opposite effect. I know Graham Greene said that every novelist needs to have an icicle in his heart - but he didn't say they needed the whole bloody fridge.

Ordering books from Persephone

You can see a complete list of Persephone Books and order online here. Or you can email us, telephone on 020 7242 9292, send a fax to 020 7242 9272 or write to the following address: Persephone Books Ltd, 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB All Persephone Books cost £10 each plus £2 postage (see more information on ordering). We can now send a book a month for six or twelve months - more >