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A tale of two genders

Charlotte Higgins

A revealing British survey of `milestone books'

London: The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion, research by the University of London has found.

Professor Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College interviewed 500 men, many of whom had some professional connection with literature, about the novels that had changed their lives. The most frequently named book was Albert Camus' The Outsider, followed by J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The project, called Men's Milestone Fiction, was commissioned by the Orange prize for fiction and The Guardian. It followed on from similar research into women's favourite novels undertaken by the same team last year.

Strikingly different

The results are strikingly different, with almost no overlap between men's and women's taste. On the whole, men preferred books by dead white men: only one book by a woman, Harper Lee, appears in the list of the top 20 novels with which men most identify.

Women, by contrast, most frequently cited works by Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and Jane Austen. They named a "much richer and more diverse" set of novels than men, according to Prof. Jardine. There was a much broader mix between contemporary and classic works and between male and female authors.

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof. Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals." Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence and tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or as support and inspiration. "The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

The researchers found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books.

A pattern

"We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof. Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. She was also surprised she said, "by the firmness with which many men said that fiction didn't speak to them."

In addition, some men cited works of non-fiction as their "watershed" books, even though they were explicitly asked about fiction. Most of the men cited books they had read as teenagers, and many of them stopped reading fiction while young adults, returning to it in late middle age.

Prof. Jardine said the research suggested that the literary world was run by the wrong people. "What I find extraordinary is the hold the male cultural establishment has over book prizes like the Booker, for instance, and in deciding what is the best. This is completely at odds with their lack of interest in fiction. On the other hand, the Orange prize for fiction [which honours women authors] is still regarded as ephemeral."

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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