I watched Persuasion tonight and enjoyed it rather a lot. I'm not a chick-lit person but it's a different story when it comes to Jane Austen. And the Brontes, too. Actually, there are many great female writers out there who don't write chick-lit, but great literary fiction. I don't think writers like Austen, the Brontes, Sylvia Plath and so on are writers who are gender-specific in terms of an audience. They have a broader appeal and can be enjoyed equally by women and men. To say that a female writer is chick-lit purely because she is female is insulting to her work.

In Austen's time, there were a lot of gothic romances and those perhaps are more like the chick-lit style thing. Minus the shopping and stilleto heels, though, I would say. And it has faded with time, mostly, which I hope the majority of current chick-lit will have done in a century or so.

Austen's books explore some of the economics of 19th century romance - the need to marry well because women couldn't really ever have the same earning power as men, etc (not that we can mostly now, either). Men who were suitable for marriage were rarely found and often their financial situation was more important than what kind of a person they were (thinking of Mr Elliot in Persuasion - rich and a jerk). Her novels were romance, but they were also social criticism and satire.

Publishers have a fair bit to answer for in the way they package novels. I don't like seeing Pride and Prejudice cover art'ed in the same sort of way that the vast majority of chick-lit, mainly because it stereotypes it as being something not worth giving a possum's left testicle about.

I have problems with female literature writers being lumped in with "chick-lit" like Bridget Jones ("It's the new Pride and Prejudice!"). But then I have a problem with bad books.

And yet...

Terrible writing abounds. And male authors of terrible novels seem to be taken more seriously than female writers, even when they're writing about the same sort of material. Well, perhaps not taken seriously, but at least tolerated more. There's an awful load of trash out there written by men and it rarely attracts the same level of criticism that chick-lit does, even though it's often more than deserving.

I dislike chick-lit, I dislike bad books in general. And I realised I unleashed the hate about chick-lit above, which seems somewhat hypocritical to criticise so grumpily. A good novel should be one that crosses the gender divide, regardless of which side it's been written from.

But I have digressed, and digressed with Olympic ability.

I just meant to say Persuasion was really very well done, considering it had been condensed to movie-length.

In other thoughts, being up rather late and watching Order in the House is not a good idea. It makes me want to shout at the TV, especially when people are arguing that allowing gay people to marry will mean that children could end up with loads and loads and loads of step-parents because people might marry and divorce again and again. Oh. My. God. Like that sort of thing doesn't happen now anyway with straight people? And there's a vast difference between marriage and people just living together.

Also, I'm very over how the opposition seems to only be majoring in minors of late.