Feminism

Rumer Godden’s prose tugs two ways at once. It is subtle, descriptive, and light, but also direct and unashamed of being turned inside out until darkness consumes it, rendering what was beautiful irrelevant and suddenly opaque. There is also a lot of it. Rumer Godden OBE (1907-1998) wrote over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction over a lifetime divided between England, where she was born, India, where she spent much of her young adulthood, and Scotland, where she lived for the last twenty years of her life. Godden’s three best-known novels, Black Narcissus, Breakfast with the Nikolides, and Kingfishers Catch Fire are set in India. Flickering with the awe and

In her Times column on Monday (£), Libby Purves valiantly attempted to fit together two things that were obviously on her mind. Discussing Pride and Prejudice, which is 200 years old this week, in relation to the modern permutations of marriage was sure to be a delicate operation. Purves argued that the book’s appeal lies in both its wit and the intellectual and emotional foreplay between Elizabeth and Darcy. What might seem ‘subversive’ for modern sensibilities, Purves suggests, is the fluttering of Elizabeth’s heart when she sees the size of Darcy’s pile. Nowadays, she argues, marriage is about ‘love’, of course. It doesn’t matter about class, wealth or gender. That

The Costa Book Awards has made its own history tonight by selecting, according to its press release, an all women shortlist* for the first time. Here are the category winners, each of whom bags £5,000: 1). Mary and Bryan Talbot win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a book that examines two father-daughter relationships: James Joyce and his daughter Lucia, and Mary Talbot’s relationship with her father, who was a James Joyce scholar. 2). Hilary Mantel takes the Costa Novel Award for Bring up the Bodies, the brilliant and demanding Booker winner about which quite enough has been written. 3). Francesca Segal’s The Innocents snaps up the Costa First Novel Award. It is

Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn’t exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with

The Roman orator Quintilian offered some practical advice to the budding politician: don’t move too languidly, flick your fingers, or tilt your neck in a feminine way if you want to master the art of rhetoric. Doing all or any of these things could make you seem unmanly. You might have been born a man, but masculinity was definitely something you had to work at. I dare say little has changed there, though perhaps any decision to bolster one’s masculinity today comes less from the kind of external pressures put upon men by society in antiquity, than personal reactions to what is deemed a societal norm (to wax or not

Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary? Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in fact, quite generally. It presents itself as something more than a book, as a corporeal embodiment of an experience that, while common to most, is presented as peculiarly the author’s own. Katherine Angel essentially seeks to re-create in book form the sex she shared with a lover (‘The Man’). In it, she also discusses the

Julia Copus’s new collection The World’s Two Smallest Humans exists in four parts, each in their own way circling the theme of loss. Two parts – ‘The Particella of Franz Xaver Süssmayr’ and ‘Hero’ – take on historic themes, the first inhabiting that of a man in 1791 ‘translating direct from the silence’ of Mozart’s shorthand for The Magic Flute while also caring for Mozart’s wife, Constanze. The second channels history too, in this case an Ovidian past made new, rejigged for a few pages in contemporary idiom. Both brief sections work well. But the collection really gets going in the two other larger sections – ‘Durable Features’ and ‘Ghost’

‘This man makes a pseudonym and crawls behind it like a worm,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in The Fearful. The weekend’s literary pages were gripped by a story of pseudonyms. R.J. Ellory, the well-regarded and critically acclaimed crime writer, has been caught penning rave reviews of his own work, and damning that of his rivals, under various pseudonyms on Amazon. Ellory ‘wholeheartedly’ regrets the ‘lapse of judgment’. The story recalls Orlando Figes’s dishonesty with Amazon reviews. Now as then, I’m at loss to understand why someone of Ellory’s reputation felt compelled to dive to this kind of petty chicanery. The additional sales garnered by positive Amazon reviews must only be a