Orange women

BRITAIN cannot boast a literary prize for a single book as rich as IMPAC; the Orange Prize, at £30,000 comes nearest, and its shortlist, too, was released this week. But the Orange is somewhat special, in that only women (of any nationality, writing in English), are eligible. It is funded in perpetuity, by an unknown female donor.

And has it caused a controversy or what? Under the headline, "Obscene, brutal, boring and dreary drivel", the Daily Telegraph's Arts Correspondent, Nigel Reynolds, recorded the views of two of the judges, the novelist Susan Hill and the critic, Val Hennessy.

"I have judged several prizes before and I have seldom come across so many books that were so bad," said Hennessy. "Some were just drivel."

Susan Hill's criticisms focussed on the subject matter of the womens' work, saying that the women were "obsessed with trivia and their own psyche", and this criticism was echoed by Hennessy.

The chair of the four woman jury, the critic Kate Mosse, responded from the whirlwind of the controversy, in (predictably) the Guardian, arguing that: "Virtually everything positive they'd said failed to make it to the paper." It is also true that the comments of the other two judges, Lorna Sage and Margaret Lally, were either not sought, or not printed.

Why did Hill and Hennessy feel the need to sound off in this way about a prize they had agreed to judge? Why did the Telegraph so gleefully publish ii piece which had little to say except that contemporary women's writing is bad?

Answering those questions weakens Victoria Glendinning's assertion, elsewhere in the Telegraph, that Feminism sounds as archaic as farthingale. "Her suggestion that a women only prize should be judged by men to add "the otherness of gender" hardly, convinces. Victoria Glendinning is probably right, however, when she says elsewhere in the Telegraph that these judges are reacting to the "closed circuit" of the single sex brief. What women fear, most of all nowadays is special pleading.

This is worrying, if there is still a cause for it. Glendinning quotes Kate Saunders, one of the founders of the prize, who referred to a report published by the Women in Publishing Group in recent years which found that books published by women received less critical attention, and that book reviewers were overwhelmingly male.

It would be a share if the fear of ghettoisation closed possibilities for women (the shortlisted writers are Pagan Kennedy, Helen Dunmore, Amy Tan, Marianne Wiggins, Anne Tyler and Julia Blackburn) particularly the possibility of pocketing 30,000 smackers. A possibility within the reach of Irish women, remember - Mary Morrissy, novelist and journalist with this newspaper - was named among four others as a writer for whom one judge had "a special affection".