WHY WOMEN READ FICTION

More than 500 women share their connection to stories.

Intrigued by women’s enduring love of fiction, Taylor (Emerita, English/University of Exeter; BFI Film Classic on Gone With the Wind, 2015, etc.), who twice directed the Liverpool Literary Festival, sent a detailed questionnaire to women she knew, worked with, or met at literary or bookshop festivals and events and conducted lengthy interviews with women writers and publishing professionals, all to answer her overarching question: “What does fiction reading mean to women?” Drawing on their responses, the author offers intimate revelations of how, where, and why women read fiction; what they read; and how women writers see themselves as “gendered (or not).” Although some findings are predictable—e.g., women read “not just for entertainment and escape, but to help us get through life’s daily trials and major challenges”—many readers convey, with clarity and sincerity, their deep emotional response to novels, characters, and authors. Reading, one woman said, “has taken me to places I longed to go and some I did not want to go.” Women’s most loved books also were unsurprising, with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre high on the list and Jane Austen as most women’s favorite writer. Some readers from diverse ethnic, class, and racial backgrounds, a minority of Taylor’s respondents, sought out books they believed could improve “their life chances and social mobility.” Noting the popularity of romance novels, erotica, and mysteries, Taylor has found that evolving attitudes about sexual relations have made romance fiction “a dynamic form” that questions archetypes such as the young naïve heroine seduced by an experienced older man, and publishers of romance increasingly realize the commercial potential of attracting LGBTQ writers and readers. Women writers offer candid insights about the particular challenges they face. Some, for example, have been frustrated by publishers’ and critics’ assumptions. “There is still a disposition,” Hilary Mantel complained, “to think that when a woman writes books, she must be commenting on The Woman Question, or on ‘What do women want?’, as if she cannot pull away from personal preoccupations.”

A warm celebration of the power of fiction.