Why do women read fiction?

Fantin-Latour, The Reading (1877)

Here is a great question. Apparently women account for 80% of all fiction sales. Why should this be? Unfortunately, neither the eponymous title by Helen Taylor (Why Women read Fiction) nor the review of it in the TLS, April 17 2020 gives us a very satisfactory answer.

There are some hints, but as with so many books on broad, attention-grabbing topics, you get the feeling that the author has wilfully ignored all previous thinking on the subject. Instead, Helen Taylor has interviewed 428 women, and the book seems to comprise extracts from these responses. It makes for an entertaining read, and makes it a much simpler book to write, but it is not a formal study. Taylor does contrast two kinds of reading, “vertical” and “horizontal” – the former being serious reading, the latter the guilty pleasure of lying on the sofa reading a novel. But of course there are many more types of reading than that; we all remember Francis Bacon’s categories of reading, and it would be helpful to consider which type of reading we are discussing. And the reviewer Lucy Scholes points out that reading novels need not necessarily be guilty, as the majority of respondents seemed to imply.

More worryingly, for a book that examines why women read fiction, there is no attempt to understand why men don’t read fiction (if we are talking generalities here, assuming you can say something about all men as a set). Yet here, the author goes off at a tangent, quoting J G Ballard: “Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves of Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text. I suspect these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.” A fascinating observation of how fiction can take on a life of its own in your imagination, but absolutely unconnected with why women or men read fiction in the first place.

Here the reviewer Lucy Scholes further muddies the waters by thinking about her own reading. As a literary critic, she is very atypical (I remember the critic Frank Kermode saying he couldn’t read any novel without taking notes, which revealed much about him as a critic, but at the same time emphasised how different he was to a typical reader). As a member of an elite that is paid to read, and patted on the back for saying cleverer things about books that most of the others in her class, Scholes unsurprisingly makes a case for reading as more than simple escapism. Essentially, reading is good for you – after all, it got Scholes (and probably Helen Taylor) to where she is today.  Reading fiction helps you empathize with others (a common argument). Helen Taylor approvingly quotes Rebecca Mead, “when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself”.  But I have been grasped and held by reading Agatha Christie, Alexander Dumas, and P G Wodehouse. It was lots of fun, but not “an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself”. I’m not simply being facetious here. Reading can grab you, but for all I know Mein Kampf might be a gripping read.

The review then moves on to even more far-fetched ideas, that there was a specific panic about women reading at the end of the 18th century (an unlikely argument that seems to be proved by mentioned that Dorothy Wordsworth was forced to sew an old shirt rather than reading The Iliad.

Finally, the argument drifts to attitudes to male and female writers, which again is of great interest but unconnected with why women read fiction. “When men write novels about family life, they are considered important and universal, while women writers who do the same are still scorned as inward-looking and provincial”. It’s a sweeping statement, and doesn’t answer the question.

The review ends by saying “for those of us who love books”, our lives are “mapped by books … we imagine ourselves into, and draw sustenance from, those stories of our lives.” Here’s the rub. Books about reading tend to be written by a group who claim they “love books”; but books are not things to be loved as a set in their entirety. If you love books, does that mean you love Mein Kampf? And worse, that reference to “those of us who love books” – the “us” is clearly women, and that subset of women who “love books”. The 20% of men who read are now ignored (and they probably don’t love books in the same way, but we never find out). The review concludes: “Surely the question isn’t why so many women read fiction, but rather why so many men still don’t?” At that point, I gave up in exasperation and went back to my book. Without any trace of guilt.