24 September 2026 - 4:00pm
Historically, the great novels have usually been written by semi-outsiders — people who are admitted to the society they are going to write about, but who are not really part of it. The great Regency or Victorian novels of attraction, courtship and marriage among the wealthy were written by spinsters who were never rich — Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. A large number of the great novelists of conventional society at the turn of the 20th century were homosexual men, such as Henry James, Samuel Butler, Thomas Mann. Novelists of grand society were frequently those who had been admitted from relatively ordinary backgrounds, Marcel Proust being one example. It seems to take a measure of exclusion and detachment to write something with a chance of insight.
The Booker Prize announced its shortlist this week, and with it came a certain measure of surprise as to the books that had been found to be excellent. The excellence wasn’t doubted by the judges, merely the identity of the authors, and perhaps their subject matter. Surprisingly, four of the six authors are male, and masculinity might be regarded as a significant theme in most of the books submitted for readers’ approval.
Some of the judges were surprised to see the final result. The musician Jarvis Cocker, who serves as one of the judges, said that “it took a while to get a book written by a man that seemed good…generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women.” This is a widely held view; certainly in the past, the partial exclusion of intelligent women from social life led to the strength of fiction by women, from Fanny Burney to Elizabeth Taylor.
But is this really true any more? Positions of power and influence in the literary world are now held largely by women. This is quite a recent thing: when my late friend A.S. Byatt was taken out for lunch by Cecil Day-Lewis to discuss the publication of her first novel, they had to eat in the basement of his club. But women, and many of the specific concerns of women, are now at the centre of things. They are, in short, quite close to being the establishment, and sometimes reading the novels of women these days includes a kind of anxiety about the responsibility that implies. A really gloriously irresponsible novel by a young woman writer, such as Kaliane Bradley’s superb The Ministry of Time, is a little rarer than it used to be.
As a result, male novelists have perhaps been liberated from the need to seek approval from official quarters. The excellence of Douglas Stuart, for instance, could not be more unfashionable — social mobility, dense realism, elegant sentences in the narrative past tense — and all the better for it. Francis Spufford’s splendid Nonesuch didn’t tempt the jurors, with its proto-Thatcherite heroine and gleefully punchy action scenes, but will surely be read when many novels bearing official approval have disappeared.
For the moment, the masculine novel has been liberated by the sense of five years ago that syllabus makers, festival programmers, prize givers, librarians and schoolteachers just weren’t interested in them, so they might as well write what they wanted to. But literary fashion is a steady pendulum. Now that the stamp of approval has fallen on novels by men, expect a revival before another 10 years in the novel of female virtues. There is nothing so invigorating to a creative artist as the sense that no specific proposal or endorsement is expected of you. Write whatever you like: it doesn’t exactly matter, after all.
Philip Hensher is the author of 11 novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. His new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, will be published by Pelican in September.
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