http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1443910,00.html

Their novels are part of the literary canon, their struggle to be recognised
well chronicled, but the efforts of George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontė
sisters and Virginia Woolf have done little to change negative views of
women writers.
In the introduction to 13, a collection of poetry, short stories and
extracts from novels, published by Picador, the authors Toby Litt and Ali
Smith make a sweeping condemnation of the subject matter, writing style and
preoccupations of female writers. Litt, the author of several books
including Corpsing and deadkidsongs, and Smith, the Scottish writer who has
been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize, sifted through
numerous submissions from women writers. Few impressed them.

In the introduction to the collection the authors write: "On the whole the
submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of
risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special
drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right
shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell."

Their criticisms drew angry responses from leading authors yesterday, some
accusing them of consigning the works of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Woolf to the
critical dustbin by suggesting the domestic was never exciting, powerful or
worthy as a subject matter.

"Defining domestic as dull is a complete misnomer," said the author Kirsty
Gunn. "This is where a large proportion of our [women's] lives are spent;
there is no reason why the word should be loaded with such pejorative
meaning. I am a writer but at the moment I am frying fish fingers and
listening to a child's violin lesson."

Amanda Craig, the author, accused the editors of not spreading their net
wide enough for submissions. "I never knew this was happening; they didn't
come to me. I wonder how many people they did approach."

She agreed, however, that there was some truth in their comments. "Women do
focus on the domestic because that reflects the truth of their lives."



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