Bibliofemme News
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16/09/2004
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights top list
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When the modern woman is in need of consolation, inspiration, or simply a different perspective on the world, it seems that she doesn't turn to recent bestsellers or this year's Booker prize longlist, but returns to those old 19th-century romantic favourites. In a poll of 400 women from academia and the arts, launched to find "watershed" or life-changing books, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights top a list of 40 largely predictable novels.
Nestling side by side in comfortable sibling rivalry on our adolescent bookshelves, flanked by Jane Austen and George Eliot, the Bronte sisters now go into battle for the supreme place in our hearts. They might not have heard of Top Shop or cellulite, but it seems the women we still most relate to are the great Victorian heroines. Passionate, reckless and a little bit bonkers - Cathy is a dire but irresistible warning of destructive, unsuitable love affairs; while the long-suffering Jane is a lesson in standing by your man. It seems we still can't resist those old fairy tale cliches: the beautiful, but tragic princess doomed to suffer or die for her love, and the forgotten Cinderella rewarded for her humility with a happy ending. The other heroines who have made it on to the list fall roughly into the same camps: Madame Bovary, Maggie Tulliver, Scarlet O'Hara, Rebecca, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, and Anna Karenina out in force for the fallen woman (all of them mercilessly punished for their transgressions); Anne Elliott, Dorothea Brooke, Mrs Dalloway and the nameless narrator of Rebecca quietly making the case for well-behaved martyrs.
It is not so easy to pigeonhole the contemporary heroines. Where are the modern female fictional archetypes? Surprisingly (and some might think dismayingly), Jeanette Winterson was the most-mentioned author of all, with three novels on the list. Among the (almost exclusively female) living novelists to make the grade, are her tortured, ambiguous heroines really the best reflection of who we are? Women are the biggest buyers of fiction - and most willing to cross the gender gap and read novels by men. But this isn't represented in this poll. Isn't it time our favourite stories moved on - or at least the endings. How about Reader, I ditched him?
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