Twenty-three years ago, a group of writers and critics, frustrated by the sheer lack of alarm that had greeted news that the authors shortlisted for that year’s Booker prize were all men, decided to take action. What if a prize were set up to honour fiction by women? In 1995, under the aegis of novelist Kate Mosse, the Orange prize, now the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, was born.
It has never looked back; the books it has rewarded speak for themselves. Over the past decade alone excellent works such as Ali Smith’s How to be Both, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun have been brought to a wide and enthusiastic readership thanks to the prize. On Monday a celebratory event in London will mark the bestowal of the “best of the best” award – the book judged to be the single most significant of the last 10 prizewinning novels.
Literary prizes, some argue, are overvalued. There are too many of them; they draw attention to only a few titles while many others, equally deserving, lie ignored. Furthermore, because based on the consensus view of a panel of judges, the truly new work, that which moves the artform into unfamiliar directions, can be overlooked.
If female experience, stories and art are undervalued, everyone misses out
In fact, the two most recent Baileys prizewinners have debunked that last notion: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Dr Smith’s How to be Both are both formally experimental – gleefully so.
The Baileys prize remains of value because our culture, even 20 years on, still favours male writers, critics and the exploration of men’s experience. Research published earlier this year found that whereas women were responsible for buying two thirds of books sold in the US and UK, you’d never know that from the way books are covered by in the media. The London Review of Books, for example, published work by or about 527 men and only 151 women in 2014. (The fact that parity can be achieved is demonstrated by the New York Times Book Review, which is near to closing the gender gap.)
The literary sphere is not alone in this bias: to cite just one example, this autumn an entire season of the flagship BBC1 arts programme Imagine will go by, scandalously, without a single woman artist being profiled.
All of this matters because each of us is shaped by the artistic and cultural impulses that we are exposed to – the stories we read, the pop songs we hear, the television and the films we watch. The manner in which women and men carry themselves through the world is not just reflected in stories, but formed by them. To some considerable extrent, we are what we read.
If female experience, stories and art are undervalued, everyone misses out. One only has to look at the sheer ravenousness with which Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels about female friendship have been devoured over the past few years to see that art that passes the Bechdel test is hungered for. (To pass this test, devised by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, a story must involve two women having a conversation that is not about men.)
Not all the Baileys prize shortlisted books would pass the Bechdel test, nor should they be required to – that is not the point. The point is that, in a culture strongly weighted against female creators, a book prize for women novelists remains a small, but important, piece of weaponry.
