Girls’ Own Stories
Words: Alistair Duncan JK Rowling dropped `Joanne’ after her publisher advised it would make it harder to sell her book. Ten years on, a new wave of women have taken English writing by storm and this time, their names are on the covers EVEN A WRITER with the most fanciful of imaginations could barely have conceived [...]
Words: Alistair Duncan
JK Rowling dropped `Joanne’ after her publisher advised it would make it harder to sell her book. Ten years on, a new wave of women have taken English writing by storm and this time, their names are on the covers
EVEN A WRITER with the most fanciful of imaginations could barely have conceived the incredible story of JK Rowling. A struggling single mother living off £70 a week in a tiny Edinburgh fl at whose forays into children’s fi ction saw her, within a decade, presiding over a wealth of more than £500m richer, allegedly, than the Queen; an unpublished writer who dreamed up the idea of a boy wizard during a bored train journey from Manchester to London, then ended up spawning a series of books that sold 300m copies worldwide and were translated into 63 languages; a modest, unremarkable-seeming woman from Gloucestershire whose creative talent was courted by Hollywood, hungry for their next multimillion-dollar juggernaut.
It sounds like a far-fetched fantasy. Except as we know, it’s completely true. The world has changed since Joanne Rowling penned her fi rst book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, published back in 1995. Potter-mania has gripped it. Five books have followed, each one apparently topping the staggering success of its predecessor. We have just seen what will be the biggest Potter release to date: the seventh instalment of Rowling’s saga about the bespectacled orphan with a gift for sorcery, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the fi nal one.
In an interview with Richard and Judy last year, Rowling said that at least two of her characters would perish in the fi nal book. Pushed on whether this would mean her eponymous hero would be bumped off she refused to elaborate, saying she didn’t "want the hate mail or anything else". However, she did say, teasingly, that she understood why authors might want to fi nish off their main characters in order to ensure they could never later be resurrected by other writers.
Her remarks have inevitably tormented and tantalised Harry Potter fans in equal measure; websites, chatrooms and fanzines have been feverish with speculation since her ambiguous utterances. Would Harry Potter fi nally join the celestial club of ex-wizards? Or would he slay arch-rival Voldemort? The truth is fi nally out there.
Of course, leaking out titbits like this was fantastic PR for the books as if they needed any push to sell. Fans of the stories (and they’re not just children but millions of adults as well) have camped outside bookstores in sleeping bags to be among the fi rst to buy the book. They listen with particular care to Rowling when she speaks, given that she is notoriously media-shy, very rarely putting her head above the parapet.
Despite untold fame and wealth, Rowling lives quietly with second husband, Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, in Edinburgh, but also has homes in Perthshire and Kensington in London. In addition to her daughter Jessica by fi rst husband, Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes, Rowling and Murray have had two young sons, David and Mackenzie. Surprisingly, Rowling seems to lead a relatively normal existence admittedly, she often travels by private jet to glamorous holiday destinations like the Seychelles but otherwise stays at home behind a typewriter, occasionally doing her bit for charity, and shuns a life of conspicuous consumption. She once said: "I’ve got a mental amount I can’t spend beyond. I limit myself to what I think I would be justifi ed in spending on frivolity."
With phenomenal success has come a correlative share of criticism. Many have argued with some justifi cation that her books are not exactly original. For her part, she has made no bones about this, readily admitting: "I’ve taken horrible liberties with folklore and mythology. But I’m quite unashamed about that." Many a po-faced literary critic has argued that the Potter books will never make it into the canon of classic children’s literature, but only time will tell.
THE OTHER FEMALE WRITERS…
JK Rowling is a one-woman publishing industry, boasting astounding book sales that have kept her publisher, Bloomsbury, laughing all the way to the bank. But Rowling is something of an anomaly. Typically, male writers are much more successful than female ones. A poll conducted by Waterstones earlier this year highlighted this: the book chain asked its 5,000 staff to list their favourite fi ve books of the last 25 years. The resulting list of the top 100 books saw men outperform women by a ratio of about 2:1. It was suggested that the explanation lay in the fact that men tend not to read female writers, while women are less picky, reading both men’s and women’s books. It’s something that Rowling herself recognised at the outset, hiding her fi rst name Joanne behind her initials.
But who are the female writers causing waves in the book world? Over the following pages, we reveal the 10 best women novelists.
1. Zöe Heller
Author of: Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal
Need to know: Journalist-turned- novelist Heller was born in North London and read English at Oxford. A successful feature writer for British broadsheets, including The Daily Telegraph, Heller, 42, was a columnist for The Sunday Times Magazine before trying her hand at fi ction. Her fi rst foray, Everything You Know, is a dark comedy about misanthropic writer Willy Miller. Her most recent novel, Notes on a Scandal, was nominated for the 2003 Man Booker and tells the tale of an illicit affair between a female teacher and her male pupil through the eyes of an obsessed colleague. It has also been made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench.
2. Stef Penney
Author of: The Tenderness of Wolves
Need to know: Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves, set in 19th-century Canada during the depths of winter, is a suspense-fi lled murder mystery rich in descriptive detail of the rugged Canadian landscape. So much so that Canadians were astounded to fi nd out that the author, who won the 2006 Costa Book of the Year (formerly The Whitbread Award) had never visited their country. Penney, 37, used to be agoraphobic and so really suffered for her art, as she was forced to research her book in the British Library in London. There she studied accounts of the Hudson Bay Company and Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to discover the North-West Passage, as a source for material. She has subsequently overcome her condition.
3. Nicola Barker
Author of: Wide Open, Five Miles from Outer Hope, Clear
Need to know: Barker, 41, was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, but spent much of her childhood in South Africa before returning to the UK aged 14. Wide Open, which won the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was set on the Isle of Sheppey and concerned itself with two brothers coming to terms with their past. Five Miles from Outer Hope is about a dysfunctional family living on an island off the coast of Devon, and Clear was inspired by David Blaine’s infamous glass box in which he staged his 44-day starvation stunt, and made the Booker Longlist 2004. "I’m presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters," she says, "and my desire is to make them understood."
4. Kiran Desai
Author of: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, The Inheritance of Loss
Need to know: When Indian-born, British-raised Kiran Desai, 35, scooped the 2006 Man Booker Prize, her mother didn’t attend the ceremony. Instead, she was "without a phone and without a television in a village in India". Anita Desai was really nervous for her daughter, and understandably so: an author herself, she has been nominated for the prize three times without winning. Nevertheless, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss scooped the prize and she said that her book felt "like a family endeavour". Judges noted that her story about an embittered, Cambridge- educated judge living as a recluse in the Himalayas was in the Anglo-Indian writing tradition of VS Naipaul and Salmon Rushdie "but created something absolutely of its own.".
5. Zadie Smith
Author of: White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty
Need to know: At the tender age of 21, Zadie Smith became a star of the 
literary world after she accepted a six-fi gure advance for White Teeth, her tale about three immigrant families in North London. The daughter of an English father and Jamaican mother, she completed her novel while studying at Cambridge. It sold over a million copies, won a raft of literary awards and confi rmed her status as our brightest young literary talent. Smith, now 31, followed it up with The Autograph Man, a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity. On Beauty, a reworking of EM Forster’s Howard’s End, was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker.
6. Ali Smith
Author of: Like, Hotel World, The Accidental
Need to know: Born in the Scottish Highlands, Ali Smith, 45, has become a well-respected writer of short stories and novels, spinning tales revolving around the theme of love that demonstrate a penchant for wordplay and quirky, amusing details. Her latest novel, The Accidental, tells the story of the mundane summer holiday of 12-year-old Astrid and her family which is interrupted by the arrival of an enigmatic guest. It won the 2005 Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker.
7
. Monica Ali
Author of: Brick Lane, Alentejo Blue
Need to know: Born to a Bangladeshi father and English mother in what was then East Pakistan, Ali, 39, arrived in Britain at the age of three. Her debut novel Brick Lane follows the life of an 18-year-old Bangladeshi woman who moves to Tower Hamlets to marry an older man. The story enraged parts of the Bangladeshi community who believed they had been portrayed as uneducated. Germaine Greer waded into the controversy by saying that the book "had the force of a defi ning caricature," but Salman Rushdie parried Greer’s remarks away, saying they were "philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but not unexpected."
8. Rachel Cusk
Author of: Saving Agnes, The Lucky Ones, Arlington Park
Need to know: Canadian-born Cusk, 40, travelled extensively round Spain and Latin America before her debut with Saving Agnes, aged just 26, to be heralded as "the outstanding discovery of 1993". The book, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, was memorably described by one writer as Bridget Jones "without the diaries or the `does- my-bum-look-big-in- this?’ jokes". Her latest book, Arlington Park, was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction..
9. Sarah Waters
Author of: Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, The Night Watch
Need to know: After studying for her PhD in lesbian and gay historical fi ction, Sarah Waters, 41, turned her hand to writing it herself, penning Tipping the Velvet, a tale based around Victorian music halls. With a lesbian love story at its core, the novel was later turned into a highly successful BBC costume drama. Her follow-up Fingersmith was similarly set in 1860s London, this time in the criminal underworld. The Night Watch, published last year, was a tale of London during the Blitz.
10. Rachel Seiffert
Author of: The Dark Room, Field Study, Afterwards
Need to know: The daughter of German and Australian parents, 36-year-old Seiffert’s fi rst novel, The Dark Room, explored the theme of Nazi guilt and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Field Study, a collection of short stories followed, before she returned to similar territory in Afterwards, published earlier this year. This latest novel examines post-traumatic stress, following military postings in Northern Ireland and 50s Kenya.
