Bookplanet: can only women write romance?

Can men write romantic novels?
TV presenter Daisy Goodwin sparked a storm by claiming they can't. Here, two Daily Telegraph writers, Ray Connolly and Liz Hunt, lock horns over the issue

Yes, says Ray Connolly

So now it's clear. The reason Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary were such unromantic flops is because both books were written by men. Big mistake.

Margaret Mitchell's epic love story, Gone With the Wind is an enduring romance

There was nothing wrong with the writers. They were good enough in their own ways. It's just that the balance of their chromosomes wasn't up to the job.

If only Sadie Tolstoy or Sharon Flaubert had done the writing, instead of Leo and Gustave, the entire history of Western literature would have been completely different.

And how do we know this? Because Daisy Goodwin, the presenter of Reader, I Married Him, a new BBC4 series on the novel, which will be transmitted this autumn, just about tells us so.

"You can't have a really seriously romantic book written by a man," she says, dismissing in a sentence the murmuring hearts of half humankind. If you're a male writer, Daisy goes on, you lack insight into the ways of women.

Oh dear! Presumably the converse is true, too, which explains why Emily Brontë was so useless at creating a believable male character. Sorry, Emily. Wrong sex. What was the name of that brooding, revengeful bloke in Wuthering Heights? No wonder he never caught on.

Now I don't want to upset Daisy Goodwin or those who think like her, since my new novel, a romantic piece called Love Out of Season, is due to be published in February and I want all the kind reviews I can get, but she really is talking through a prism of prejudice and stereotype.

Admittedly, men's names don't crop up so often on those displays of books with pink, frilly covers in Waterstone's and Borders, but in truth the history of literature is filled with romantic stories written by men.

They just do it in a different way, from Shakespeare's take on the old Montague and Capulet story to Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.

But isn't High Fidelity about a lad and his records? Yes, but it's also about a bloke and his relationship, because boys fall in love, too.

And despite the barrage of propaganda telling us that all men want is sex, the truth is, as any man will tell you, they don't. Not that it isn't good fun now and again, as any woman will tell you.

There may well be differences in the way men's and women's brains are wired, but don't try to tell me that men and women can't empathise with each other.

Has Daisy Goodwin never sat with a man watching a romantic movie and seen him crying? If she hasn't, she should have been round at our house the other night when Love Story was on television again and Ali McGraw died of leukaemia.

Of course, if the novel from which that movie was taken had been written by a woman instead of a Yale classicist called Erich Segal, it might even have been a bestseller. Who knows, women might even have read it.

Teasing aside, it seems to me that most stories are about people in relationships, and how relationships change people.

Nearly always, relationships are about love and, yes, desire, too, and love inevitably involves romance in its many and varied forms. But neither men nor women have a monopoly on falling in love.

If it was only women writers who had the romantic gift, what on earth was John Donne doing wasting his time mooning about that flea in his sonnet, why did Graham Greene get himself into such a state in The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, and what was Richard Curtis thinking about, trying to make a career from writing romantic screenplays such as Notting Hill and Love Actually? I could go on.

I know it makes it easier for publishers and bookshops if they can label a book as a "woman's novel", and certain kinds of stories obviously appeal more to one sex than the other.

I don't suppose Andy McNab has many women wanting to read about how he won in Iraq. But then, I don't want to read it either.

It seems to me that we're all romantics, and the idea that one sex is simply emotionally incapable of understanding the way the other thinks is to deny everything men and women share – and, worryingly from a creative point of view, to deny all authors the possibility of understanding anyone of the opposite sex. And I can't believe that.

But if Daisy Goodwin needs convincing further, might I recommend that she places an order right now for Love Out of Season by Ray Connolly. It's wonderfully romantic, brought a tear to the author's eye now and again when he was writing it, and it's coming soon to a bookshop near her.

No, says Liz Hunt

Ask any woman to name her favourite romantic novel and the likelihood is that she will mention one of two titles: Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice.

No matter that the hero of one is a psychopath, given to roaming the moors in a frenzy of rage, despair and sexual frustration, while the other stands around in drawing rooms being superior.

At the heart of both, there is a brooding, obsessive, all-consuming passion that every woman – if she is being honest – aspires to be the object of at some time in her life.

It is how women would like men to feel about them, but they know that in reality such feelings will last only until his hangover kicks in or Chelsea kicks off.

So they must seek that passion between the covers (of a book) and it is only another woman who really knows how to deliver it because she has been there – or would like to have been there – too.

For example, women don't love Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca because of the desperate-to-please second wife's adoration of Maxim.

What fascinates them is his tormented – and, we suspect, enduring – love for the beguiling but black-hearted witch who was the first Mrs de Winter.

Women also identify with heroines who are the source, rather than the object, of the brooding, obsessive, all-consuming passion, albeit cunningly disguised, as in the case of Jane Eyre.

Then there is a woman's desperate longing for a lost love so brilliantly deconstructed in Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone.

I would argue that only a woman can truly capture these emotions in a credible way, because she has experienced them or can imagine experiencing them in a way that a man simply cannot.

Men are more used to pursuit and action. Ask a man what is his favourite romantic novel and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair or Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong may get a mention.

For those unfamiliar with either, it's basically sex combined with the Blitz in one, and with the horrors of trench warfare in the other.

You see, too often male writers get caught up in the story – "Events, dear boy, events" – whereas women writers better understand that they must keep the romance central, that it drives a narrative better and faster than any other device. For women, it is the ultimate reason to turn a page.

The Da Vinci Code, though thinly written (by a man), was attention-grabbing enough with its mutilated curator and self-flagellating albino monk, but I persevered with it because – I'm ashamed to admit – I was curious to find out what would happen between the hero Robert Langdon and his sidekick Sophie Neveu.

And, yes, of course, the fall of Atlanta was an interesting peripheral happening in Gone With the Wind. But my 15-year-old self wasn't interested in the historical context, I just wanted to know if Scarlett would ever understand that Rhett was the only man who understood her and truly loved her and therefore should not possibly be passed over in favour of weedy Ashley Wilkes.

Just three weeks ago, I saw the film version on a cable channel and was seduced again by Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece. I knew how it would end, but how I wished that Scarlett would damn well seize the day (and Rhett), instead of wittering on and on about tomorrow.

Women writers are better at detail, too – and details are essential in creating a romantic build-up: what he wore, what she wore, how they were standing, how they moved, how they touched.

The novelist Charlotte Bingham once observed that there were no descriptions of what the heroine was wearing in Madame Bovary. The closest Flaubert came to describing her dress was that it was something white and frilly.

According to Bingham, men just don't appreciate "that a soul, or heart might be longing to make the right kind of romantic sounds, but will be turned away for no better reason than that he has plumped for wearing fawn which, alas, doesn't do a thing for her". Women appreciate this – and so much more – and that's why they're better at romantic fiction.