Bookplanet: the big diffferences between what men and women like to read

1. Change your life with Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice wins Radio 4 poll of women's fiction
Hadley Freeman

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the book women feel has most transformed their lives is the one that has assured them for the past two centuries that, yes, they will marry the wealthy, handsome man next door and live happily ever after.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's salty-tongued commentary on the plight of women in the 19th century, perhaps best known today for providing Colin Firth with the opportunity to pose in a wet shirt in front of many grateful viewers, has won the Women's Watershed Fiction poll, it was announced yesterday on Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

Despite being specifically about women's lives 200 years ago, the relevance of Austen's classic has not diminished, according to the 14,000 voters who took part in the poll, 93% of whom were women. It is, according to the poll, the novel that "has spoken to you on a personal level; it may have changed the way you look at yourself, or simply made you happy to be a woman".

Harper Lee's semi-autobiographical tale of racial prejudice in the American deep south, To Kill a Mockingbird, came second, despite the fact that the main female character, Scout, is a child, and that the only major adult female character in the novel is one who falsely cries rape against an innocent man.

The other runners-up were, in descending order, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, The Women's Room by Marilyn French and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

The poll was run by the literary critic Lisa Jardine, while the novelists Sarah Dunant, Marina Warner, Monica Ali, Jenny Colgan and Jill Dawson spoke out in support of the chosen top five on yesterday's programme.

However, female solidarity in support of the choices has not been universal.

The journalist and writer Julie Burchill was particularly scathing about the chosen top five, her main point of contention being that "if Jane Austen heard women today talking about clitorises she'd faint ... I can't see why Pride and Prejudice would make one feel proud to be a woman. If the question was, which book makes you proud to wear an empire line dress, then I could understand it".

The more overtly feminist choices - "the slash your wrist corner", according to Burchill - were given equally short shrift.

The writer Suzanne Moore similarly questioned Austen's relevance to 21st-century women, albeit with slightly less specific and descriptive objections: "I can't see how it changed women's lives, it just confirmed what they were meant to be. It is a great book, but it's about how women have to shape themselves within social conventions."

However, the author Helen Simpson, whose book Hey Yeah Right Get a Life has been acclaimed for its startlingly realistic depiction of modern motherhood, praised the winning choice: "Pride and Prejudice is inspiring because the pitch is so perfect," she said.

The psychotherapist Susie Orbach professed surprise at the final list - "Where are the young women?" - but said women's continuing weakness for the happy ending with a wedding wasn't a shock: "There is still all of this longing in our psychology. We want these lovely redemptive romantic endings, to be seen and understood, but within the confines of femininity."

Nevertheless, perhaps the most striking feature of the list is how all of the authors are white and none of the books was written later than 1986. "It's not very multicultural, is it?" added Dr Orbach.

As with any poll, the temptation is to try to draw some conclusion about today's world.

Simpson said there was one factor that united the top five: "All of these books feature characters who are in some way second-class citizens, yet are spirited and uncompromising in their search for freedom and, in some cases, love as well. They aren't victims, but they do have to struggle in society."

Birchill questioned the value of any poll about women's literature: "I think if people had been hooked up to lie detectors the winner would have been Jackie Collins."

Inspiring? The runners-up

2. To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee's only novel is a quasi-autobiographical depiction of her childhood in the Deep South. Focusing on the adventures of the young girl Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill, the book depicts the bitter racism that Lee saw as a child. Scout's father, Atticus Finch, defends an innocent black man against accusations of rape by a white woman.

3. Jane Eyre

Is this a tale of a repressed, dependent woman who ultimately marries her tyrannical employer? Or is it a groundbreaking work, full of metaphorical allusions to a woman embracing her sexuality? Whichever reading you subscribe to, Charlotte Brontë's novel is an odd choice for a book that makes women "feel proud to be a woman".

4. The Women's Room

Hugely influential when it was published in 1977, Marilyn French's book now reads more as a fascinating period piece than as a timeless feminist tome. It depicts the joyless marriage between a middle-class woman and her bullying husband, and includes the infamous line "all men are rapists, they rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes".

5. The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood's satiric novel depicts a society in which women are forced to have miserable sex with men they dislike and are forbidden from having jobs or owning any property. Quite how this book makes any woman feel proud to be a woman or changes the way she looks at herself is something to ponder.


2. The books that move men
When Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins asked women which book had helped them most during their lives, the clear winner was Jane Eyre, with Pride and Prejudice not too far behind. When they repeated the exercise with men, a very different reading list emerged ...
Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins

A little over a year ago, we conducted a survey of women readers to find a "watershed" women's novel - the book which, above all others, had sustained individual women through key moments of transition or crisis in their lives. We began by polling women who were prominent in the arts and the media, then moved on to women journalists, academics, university students, schoolteachers and sixth formers. By the end we were polling every woman reader who crossed our paths; in total, 400 women responded to our inquiry.

Absolutely every woman we spoke to had her favourite. The top titles that emerged were surprisingly varied. They ranged from The Lord of the Rings and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Catch 22, Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, Heart of Darkness and The Golden Notebook. This was alongside such perennial favourites as Jane Eyre (our way- out-in-front eventual winner), Mrs Dalloway, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. Jeanette Winterson's Passion and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale had bands of loyal followers.

This year, we tackled the obvious next question: what do men read to get them through life? If polling women's reading habits had thrown up such an astonishing variety of reading, surely men's reading would be equally revealing. After all, as two female researchers, we might have been prepared for women's reading choices; in the case of men, we admitted we really hadn't a clue.

Our sample of reading men was selected on exactly the same principles as the women - that way, we felt the results could be directly compared. The first thing we found, unexpectedly, was that the men were more reluctant than the women to discuss the influence reading might have had on them. Or, perhaps it might be more accurate to say, they seemed suspicious of the question. Women had responded to our questionnaire without hesitation, producing a number of key moments in their life at which they unselfconsciously acknowledged that fiction had offered them guidance or solace. Many men we approached really did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices.

"Perhaps it's the gender of the interviewer," suggested Stephen Beresford, one of a number of informants from the world of theatre. "Perhaps certain men have a problem opening up to a female interviewer. I don't really see why, but maybe it's a macho thing." Jon Elek, lecturer in English at University College London, told us: "I guess that if you admit to having a watershed novel, then you're admitting to having a watershed moment, which is something that a lot of men don't necessarily want to admit to. And to admit to having five [as respondents were asked to do] - oh, come on!"

Where they did produce titles, men's reading did not show the same range as the women's had done. For the women's project we interviewed 400 women and ended up with some 200 titles. We found we had to approach a significantly larger sample of men to get a similar number of responses. From an early stage, the choices clustered around a set of out-and-out favourites: Camus's The Outsider, Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. These titles remained consistently popular, which was something that failed to happen with the women's titles, which changed daily, throwing up little-known books alongside familiar classics.

Still, in spite of a certain angst about revealing that fiction had any impact on their day-to-day lives, the great majority of our respondents were intrigued by our inquiry and happily offered us time, leading to some fascinating results. Men's formative reading does indeed differ markedly from women's. Only four titles were shared between the women's and men's top 20, and there was no overlap at all in the top five.

Our final top 20 of men's reading clearly shows a majority of books with strong active narrative themes - books that might traditionally be described at quintessential boys' books. No surprise there, perhaps. Except that both our recorded interviews and questionnaire responses show these choices being made on the basis of a conscious commitment to novels that take the reader in a direction of personal development. Men's reading choices tend to identify themselves with novels that include intellectual struggle. Personal vulnerability is represented as a more or less angst-ridden struggle against convention, a sense of isolation from social normality. Catastrophe and the struggle to rise above circumstance characterise the plots.

Part of the reason for this, we decided, was that, to a far larger degree than women, men's formative reading was done between the ages of 12 and 20 - indeed, specifically around the ages of 15 and 16. For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence. Many men admitted that they had read little fiction since, though mature men returned to fiction reading in later life, and expressed increasing enjoyment in reading for "self-reflection".

Between 20 and 40, many men we talked to openly showed an almost complete lack of interest in reading which drew them into personal introspection, or asked them to engage with the family and the domestic sphere. On the other hand, those who had remained avid readers could see distinct patterns emerging in their choices which differed from those selected by women.

Professor Rob Dickins, a record-industry impresario with boundless energy for reading whom we had interviewed early on in our survey, pointed out that reading in later life was bound to be influenced by that emotionally shaping reading at 15 to 16, and that women and men would surely arrive in maturity at different patterns of reading based on adolescent choices. "Depending on whether you read Alcott's Little Women or Kafka's Metamorphosis at 15, your reading paths are bound to diverge later on," he said.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

And what of female authors? Six male authors made it into the women's top 20. Only one woman has made it on to the men's: Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird). Is it churlish of us to suspect that some men did not realise that Harper was a woman? Women consistently told us they read books by men and women indifferently, and this has been borne out by other research than our own. Men consistently told us they too were not influenced by the gender of the author, but they were much more specific and literal about the kind of plot and character they were interested in reading about. This may have produced an accidental concentration on male authors, for "adventure" and "triumphing over adversity" fiction. It was clear to us that men who continued reading fiction into maturity became increasingly open to novels by women - Iris Murdoch was a particular favourite here.

So how, in the end, do we interpret the men's list, and our outright winner - Camus' The Outsider, in translation? From the face-to-face interviews as well as the raw data a real pattern emerges: men use fiction almost physically as a guide to negotiate a difficult journey (but would rarely admit to this downright being the case). They use fiction almost topographically, as a map. Many of our women respondents last year explained that they used novels metaphorically - the build-up to an emotional crisis and subsequent denouement in a novel such as Jane Eyre might have helped negotiate an emotional progress through a difficult divorce, or provided support during a difficult period at work, or provided solace when things seemed generally dull.

This did not seem ever to be the case for men, though some men admitted to having made a sound investment in an author - such as Orwell - whom they used as a guide throughout their adult life on the basis of a first encounter in adolescence.

It is Orwell who leaves us with our final sense of fascination with men's choices of fiction reading. For Orwell's writing has traditionally been associated, by critics such as Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, with a transition from "grammar-school boy" to mature membership of a British intelligentsia whose feelings and beliefs transcend class and community. Is that aspiration still strong among men in culture and the media (our chosen constituency) today?

Brontë v Camus

Jane Eyre By Charlotte Brontë

Number of pages: 502, in quite small type

Plot: A young orphan raised by a cruel aunt then sent away to boarding school becomes the governess at a grand house. She falls in love with her handsome, brooding boss, Rochester. Unfortunately he has omitted to mention he is married, to Bertha, who is mad and confined to the attic. Fortunately Jane finds out in the nick of time and leaves. Unfortunately she cannot forget Rochester, even when an upright missionary type offers marriage. Fortunately Bertha burns the house down, killing herself, so Jane gets her man.

Standardbearer for: Female independence and refusal to be compromised. The message is that love will triumph over any adversity - class, madness, plain looks.

Prevailing atmosphere: Dark. Victorian. Strong sense of wild moors, over which Jane somehow hears Rochester calling her name.

Most memorable line: "Reader, I married him."

Cultural spinoffs: Any number of ruffle-shirted adaptations giving excuses for brooding men and not-so-plain women to smoulder at each other: Ciaran Hinds and Samantha Morton, William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine ...

The Outsider By Albert Camus

Number of pages: 117, in rather larger type

Plot: A young, amoral bachelor called Meursault kills an Arab on a beach in a fit of heat-induced rage. At his trial, the fact that he did not cry at his mother's funeral is a central piece of circumstantial evidence. He is sentenced to death, which merely serves to confirm his conviction that the universe is indifferent.

Standardbearer for: Brooding lonerdom. Sartrean existentialism. (According to Camus himself, Meursault's refusal to express remorse - his adherence to a kind of absurd truth - is a sort of bravery. "I tried," Camus said, "to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve.")

Prevailing atmosphere: Blinding light off water; unbearable heat. Anomie. Detachment punctuated by sudden flurries of violence and anger.

Most memorable line: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." (It is the first line of the book.)

Cultural spinoffs: Lo Straniero (1967), by Luchino Visconti. Inspired the Cure's Killing an Arab, as well as, some say, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.


3. A tale of two genders: men choose novels of alienation, while women go for passion
Camus tops the male 'milestones' list
Charlotte Higgins

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's The Outsider, followed by JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The project, called Men's Milestone Fiction, commissioned by the Orange prize for fiction and the Guardian, followed on from similar research into women's favourite novels undertaken by the same team last year.

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 Brontë, Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and Jane Austen. They also 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 also found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books.

"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". The historian David Starkey said, for instance: "I fear fiction, of any sort, has never worked on me like that ... Is that perhaps interesting in itself?"

In addition, some men cited works of non-fiction as their "watershed" books, even though they were explicitly asked about fiction.

For example, David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party, picked out Robert Graves's first world war memoir Goodbye to All That as his watershed book: "Brilliantly written, wonderfully clear and his description of life in WWI is harrowing but fascinating," he told the researchers. Most of the men cited books they had read as teenagers, and many of them stopped reading fiction while young adults, only returning to it in late middle age.

Prof Jardine said that 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." She noted that when Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson had started writing novels in the 18th century, the new literary genre was regarded as strictly for women.

"On the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers - many of whom are women - to go through the same kind of recognition," Prof Jardine said.

The list in full

The Outsider by Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut