Move over, male writers, your era is over. That, at any rate, is the view of Debbie Taylor, editor of Mslexia, a new magazine for women writers that's just been launched in Britain.
"From birth," Debbie says, "women display a greater aptitude for and love of words." I assume she has the statistics to back this up, and also to substantiate her following claims: "Girls speak, read and write earlier than boys and stay ahead in verbal skills all the way through school. As women, they tend to buy more books than men, borrow more from libraries and spend more time reading. In fact, there are now twice as many women literature graduates than men, and twice as many are enrolling in creative-writing courses."
So why aren't there more published women writers? Well, she says, home-care and child-care get in the way ("It's no coincidence that so many prominent women authors, today and throughout history, are either childless or lesbian or both"), while confidence is another big problem, women being much less likely than men to submit their work for scrutiny in the "masculine domain" that currently constitutes the world of literature.
But not for much longer, because "the tide is on the turn. Never before have so many women taken writing quite so seriously." Indeed, cheered by the fact (though from what source she doesn't say) that eight years ago 43 per cent of those who described writing as their main occupation were women, she predicts that by 2001 female writers will outnumber their male counterparts.
Well, that's fascinating to learn, even if I can't quite grasp the significance of Debbie's triumphalist prediction. What exactly will be the benefit to the reader? Better books? The end of Jeffrey Archer? No more rhapsodies about how football can change one's life? Somehow I doubt it.
I LIKED Nessa O'Mahony's poems when I heard her read them in the Winding Stair in Dublin last year , and I'm now enjoying her first collection, Bar Talk, which has just been published by iTaLiCs Press at £5.99.
Nessa, who produces and presents Anna Livia's weekly arts show and runs the Dublin Writers Centre website as well as being public relations officer for the Irish Insurance Federation, writes verse that is deft and elegant, sometimes dryly amused (and amusing), sometimes poignant, always accessible, which some of us think poetry should try to be. Here's Slipping Skin:
I prefer the snake's routine.
She has enough
of one scene or another
so she gives a shrug
and shimmies out of skin,
discards a dried-out sheath
coiled in the mark of a question
she's not bothered answering.
DR Michael Solomons writes from Ballsbridge to say that Gabriel Fielding, mentioned here a few weeks back as a once-lauded but now neglected novelist, was the pen name of Alan Barnsley, a student in Trinity's medical school from 1936 to 1941. Dr Solomons knows this because the future novelist and himself were co-students.
On foot of that, Dr Solomons may or may not be aware that the Fielding pseudonym (chosen because the writer's mother, an unsuccessful dramatist, was a descendant of Henry Fielding) wasn't used for his first book, a volume of poems entitled The Frog Prince, published under his real name in 1952. And prior to his literary career, Barnsley served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war, and then set up in private practice in Maidstone, which included attendance at Maidstone Prison.
He was writer-in-residence at Washington State University, Pullman, in 1966, gained a professorship there a year later and stayed in America for the rest of his life. That may have dimmed his reputation back home, but The Birthday King (1962), which concerns a rich Jewish family in Nazi Germany, remains a powerful novel.
BOOK dealers from the UK will be among those at the first Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association Dublin book fair in the Freemason's Hall, Molesworth Street, over the Easter weekend. Admission is £1 and the fair opens at 10 a.m. on the Saturday and Sunday.
THREE quotations: 1) It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. 2) She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. 3) Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest-dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
Raymond Chandler, of course, who died 40 years ago yesterday. They don't write them like that anymore.