David Sexton: Male authors are now hiding their gender — what a shame

The discovery that some male authors are now being encouraged by their publishers to adopt gender-neutral pseudonyms in order to attract — or at least not repel — female readers has tickled the fancy of many.

It’s a small moment of triumph, said Allison Pearson yesterday, speculating that “up in the great library in the sky, Currer Bell and George Eliot are exchanging a wry glance of satisfaction”.

For the tables have been turned. There has been such a long tradition of women writers being forced to use either male pseudonyms, like George Eliot and George Sand, or neutral signatures such as Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell (the Brontë sisters) and, most recently, JK Rowling, that it seems a reversal to celebrate.

The commercial imperative is clear enough. Women buy two-thirds of the books bought in Britain and a 2014 survey of 40,000 readers by the site Goodreads found that 46 of the 50 most-read books by women were written by women — while men choose a similar ratio of books by men (although when they do read books by women they rate them highly).

For anyone who wants to believe that we read in order to understand lives other than our own, these stats are head-claspingly awful. Is not writing fiction a rare activity in which gender can be transcended?

Charlotte Brontë believed so: “To such critics I would say, ‘To you I am neither man nor woman, I come before you as an author only — it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me, the sole ground on which I accept your judgment’.”

But we don’t judge literature like that. We live in a delegate culture, not an imaginative one. This is the flip side of diversity.

Even in the supposedly sophisticated context of writers and critics choosing their favourite books for summer, it’s comically apparent that people persistently read within their identity group, seeking affirmation, not challenge.

Has there ever been, though, a more gender-specific form than “domestic noir”, that booming and degraded genre that ever more baroquely tortures women with the dread that everything they trust is a mirage, and that they have not been merely duped but are deranged, amnesiac, in a coma or already dead?

This is an arena in which male authors are, in common decency, only allowed to enter in gender-neutral disguise. Thus the bestseller The Girl Before (“everything that’s yours was once hers”) has been profitably marketed as by the mysterious “JP Delaney”, not by former adman Tony Strong.

Perhaps this success is, perversely, proof that it’s the words on the page that matter, and that authors are not so confined by their sex? Perhaps. Even so, male writers might do better to tiptoe away from this market, just from compassion, if that at least still exists.