Do we need the Orange Prize to support women writers?

Munira Mirza
posted 19 June 2007

One reason I have never been convinced that women writers need special awards to ‘make it’, is that they already feature pretty heavily in the literary canon. Most people will have heard of, if not read from the great store of British female novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, AS Byatt, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Zadie Smith (and that’s only high brow; if we look at popular fiction, women easily dominate – Agatha Christie, Catherine Cookson, Danielle Steele, J K Rowling).

Perhaps it is too easy to point to the literary world of the past and assume a level playing field today. After all, the Orange Prize is for contemporary writers, rather than those who are established in the annals of history. But in reality, the publishing world is probably more skewed towards women’s taste than men’s anyway. Last year British women bought 188 million books compared to 128 million for men. Girls are three times more likely than boys to borrow books from public libraries, a trend which continues into their adult lives. Women populate the publishing profession.

It is therefore hard to see why female writers should need a leg up the fiction ladder when women already dominate the market as consumers. Even the organisers don’t seem too convinced. When I visited the website for the Orange Prize for Fiction, I found that it hardly mentions the fact that the prize is exclusively for women. The whole point of the award - to give special recognition to women on the basis of their exclusion from the mainstream - seems so bizarre that even the sponsors seem faintly embarrassed by it.

That is why hardly anybody – not even Orange – seems to be interested in the pseudo-feminism of the Orange prize. I half suspect the Orange is not really taken seriously as a ‘women’s prize’, but is instead just another device invented by publishers to sell books. Prizes have become a pragmatic strategy for the publishing industry to win column inches for authors, get a sticker on the front cover and win some literary credibility for the house. In this sense, the categories chosen can seem arbitrary - the veneer of feminist radicalism is pretty thin. In the Frequently Asked Questions part of the Orange site, the question ‘Why isn’t there a similar prize for men?’ is answered thus: 'Because no-one has, as yet, put in the time, creativity, effort and enthusiasm necessary to start one up and keep it going'. So, the Orange Prize is not about addressing gender inequality or promoting ‘women’s fiction’, it is just a prize that happens to be for women, and could exist just as easily for men if someone bothered to make it happen.

But before we dismiss the Orange Prize as unnecessary for putting forward female authors, is there still a place in today's literature for the category of ‘women’s fiction’? About ‘women’s issues’? This is a notion that still exists in academia. My own university tutors specialised in ‘feminist literature’ and the ‘hidden stories’ of women through the ages. I recall a section in my school library called ‘women’s literature’, which seemed to store books about growing up, lesbianism and family life.

It is certainly true that women’s experiences have been different to men’s throughout history and their literature may well reflect this. The highpoint of the English novel was during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when women occupied tightly defined social positions, bound to the private, domestic sphere. This would suggest that they automatically had a distinctively different perspective to men, who spent little time in the house. In Victorian Britain, women writers were well equipped to observe the emotional drama of domestic life. They had a unique insight into the events of family and home, and only a brief glimpse of the public world from which they were excluded.

Yet interestingly, this confinement produced a genre of romantic and horror fiction by women, which were a staple of Victorian female readers. Ann Radcliffe pioneered the genre in Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1796). Later of course, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818), a novel of ideas and intellect, as well as terror and the sublime. These were not gentle, ‘feminine’ books but gory fantasies which signalled imagination and depth.

The confinement of women also delivered women novelists who were able to get beyond the clichés and see into the social contradictions of their time. Like post-colonial writers who can see western societies from the outside inwards, women’s external position gives them a unique perspective on the average and normal, bringing to life the pains and struggles of life and making them truly universal.

Hence, the best women writers have been those who present the private sphere as profane, rather than as idealised boudoir. Jane Austen wrote perceptively about the eighteenth century rituals of marriage and the ‘little rubs and disappointments everywhere’ (Emma 1816). Her novels were hardly romantic epics but were steeped in the grubby business of marriage contracts and negotiations, so much so that the sociology professor, Mary Evans, has named her the first anthropological writer. Indeed, Austen takes to task her own sex and its preoccupations with the fanciful, as she parodies gothic fiction in her own Northanger Abbey (1803). By contrast, the most toe-curling clichés of romantic Victorian fiction have been produced by male writers (just think of Dickens’ irritatingly sweet Esther Addley in Bleak House, who the reader wishes would die from almost her first introduction).

At the same time, ‘women’s issues’ have been thoroughly explored by men. Possibly the most convincing portrayal of a woman’s broken heart is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77), followed quite closely by Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady (1880-1881). The interior life of a woman is not incomprehensible to men.

Women writers today are less confined to their homes and have greater opportunities to explore the inner life, as well as the social and political world. They are free to discuss more ideas and challenge convention (think of Lionel Shriver’s superb 2005 Orange Prize-winner We Need to Talk About Kevin which broke the ultimate taboo by saying that sometimes mothers regret the decision to have children).

If women writers today are stuck in their homes and cannot get away from the trivial affairs of the heart as Muriel Gray, a judge for this year's Orange Prize, has suggested, perhaps this is a problem that afflicts all literature. At the same time, the affairs of the heart should not be dismissed too lightly as ‘unserious’. I return to possibly the greatest novel of all time - Anna Karenina. No-one would dare to say that was just about a woman with ‘boyfriend trouble’ now, would they?