Domestic drama
Comments made in the introduction to a literary anthology just released in England have caused an uproar amongst the country’s literary community. In their introduction to The New Writing 13, editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith claimed that most of the submissions they received from women authors were “disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking — as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell.” This contention has been vociferously opposed by a number of authors and publishing people, including Alexandra Pringle, editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury, who wondered what women authors the two editors have been reading: “This year some of the novels we are publishing at Bloomsbury from women authors include Helen Oyeyemi’s debut novel about a girl who is half Nigerian, half English, who has a dead twin and a gothic imaginary friend; Helen Cross’s second novel narrated by a young man about the nature of celebrity; Kamila Shamsie’s fourth novel about politics and power, families and loss in Pakistan; Leila Aboulela’s second novel about a woman’s journey towards Islam and Joanna Briscoe’s third novel about a couple whose relationship is torn apart by the presence of a quietly sinister young woman in their lives…. I wonder whether perhaps Toby Litt and Ali Smith couldn’t manage to get out of their own kitchens for long enough to find such exciting and unusual writers as I have listed above, from just one of many publishing houses in Britain?” The Guardian has published a number of similar responses on its website, as well as an excerpt from the contentious introduction.
Related links:
Read the Guardian article on The New Writing 13 anthology
Read some of the responses to the Guardian article
Read an excerpt from Toby Litt and Ali Smith’s anthology introduction
Talk about your proverbial tempest in a teapot — while Smith and Litt, editors of an anthology of new writing, remember, were commenting specifically on the submissions that they received (they also refer to the majority of the submissions as “dauntingly undaring”, not just those from female writers), their comments have been taken as generalizations and removed from all context to give other folks a perceived good excuse to rant. Or, in the case of Pringle, to promote her recent list…