Clara Bow Clara Bow My Story Histria Books|Histria A&E, February 2026.
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
The introduction is a joy to read – beautifully written, informative, and sensitive to the star whose story is told in the following pages. This too, is informative. Not only is it the story of a young woman whose distinctive appearance and behaviour questioned roles for women in both silent and talkie movies, but the story of that industry. To see the change from the silent era to advances in film technology through the way in which Clara Bow approached the changes, and succeeded, is a valuable way of learning this story as well as that of a remarkably engaging star. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.
Bonnie Clevering with Jason Clevering Continuity by Bonnie Clevering: Life Beyond the Credits, Punctuate Press, September 2025.
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
Continuity combines Clevering’s personal and public lives so skilfully that she not only provides an engaging story of her own life but advances the value of the roles of those whose credits pass quickly at the end of the film – often when an audience is streaming out of the cinema. Her voice throughout, talking about her domestic life, her various jobs, in and out of films, and dealing with actors is authentically that of a woman of integrity, thoughtfulness and self-awareness. I began feeling that this book was a little slow, but soon could not put it down. Continuity is a wonderful read, about a fascinating industry and Bonny Clevering’s role in it, as well as engaging with someone I began to admire. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.
Australian Politics
Paul Bongiorno
Inside Murray Watt’s environmental deal
Parliament’s last sitting week for the year was an intense guessing game, as Environment Minister Murray Watt haggled with competing sides on how best to reform Australia’s environment laws.
Watt had put everything on the line politically, creating a deadline to finalise what was in fact a five-year journey to reach a destination everybody agreed was needed, namely the implementation of recommendations proposed by businessman Graeme Samuel after his review of a framework that had been in place for 25 years.
Watt, the ebullient Queenslander, who has become Anthony Albanese’s chief fixer, delivered the government a significant win after convincing the 10 Greens he needed in the Senate that the perfect no longer needed to be the enemy of the good.
The demands of the Greens’ environmental protections lead negotiator, Sarah Hanson-Young, weren’t quite as robust as some of her colleagues would have liked, but, in the end, Hanson-Young viewed the amended bill as a vast improvement on the version that was originally presented.
Coal and gas projects would no longer be fast-tracked and, critically, there was significantly less delay in ending the logging of native forests. There was also more protection of the natural environment and endangered species.
Earlier in the week, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley suspected Watt and Albanese were about to do what she described as a “dirty deal” with the Greens. Her concerns were principally over the fate of natural gas projects, which she claims are essential to providing affordable energy.
The Coalition was most unhappy about the proposed environment protection agency and its ability to heavily fine industry for flouting environmental safeguards.
This was a key recommendation of the Samuel Review and gives Australia for the first time what Albanese says is a strong independent regulator. Samuel told the prime minister he is elated his reforms have finally been implemented.Watt had put everything on the line politically, creating a deadline to finalise what was in fact a five-year journey to reach a destination everybody agreed was needed, namely the implementation of recommendations proposed by businessman Graeme Samuel after his review of a framework that had been in place for 25 years.
The truth is the Coalition was struggling to present consistent demands. Watt says he was dealing not only with shadow minister Angie Bell but also with “multiple Coalition frontbenchers” who had come to him with their own thoughts. It was “quite difficult to then work out who was the actual negotiator and what is their position”. He said he had meetings with Coalition representatives who would say they’ve “got their final list of demands, and then we meet with someone else, and they’ve got other demands”.
Watt bristled at Ley’s criticism of him for “mismanag[ing] this entire process” and, she says, endangering the resources sector that is critical for “our national income”.
Watt says the reformed Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act strikes the right balance between conservation and project developments, which includes housing.
During the tense negotiations this week senior ministers were very nervous about concluding a deal with a fractious Coalition. One cited the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2009, signed off by then Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull. Ultimately, that deal was broken, the leader was dumped and the vote failed in parliament.
That has not been Ley’s fate, although the parliamentary year ends with her being regarded as a seat warmer, waiting for one of her conservative rivals to strike.
Things are much more settled under the leadership of Larissa Waters in the Greens party room. A cabinet minister observed:
“The Greens all have their say in their party room, but they trust their negotiator, Hanson-Young, and once they have made a decision, stick with it.” The Greens insisted more notice be taken of the potential climate change impact of any environmental or development projects, a view with considerable support, according to the latest Essential Report.
However, the Coalition’s abandonment of the net zero target and the rise of support for One Nation, an even more strident critic of climate science and action, appears to have taken a toll. Polling shows an erosion in the number of Australians who accept climate change is happening and caused by human activity. It now stands at 53 per cent, down from a high of 64 per cent eight years ago.
According to the same poll, 36 per cent of people believe Australia is not doing enough to address climate, against 20 per cent who think it is doing too much.
The opposition seems hell-bent on representing this minority. Rather than welcome Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen taking an active international role as president of policy negotiations for next year’s COP31 in Türkiye, advancing the net zero target set in Paris in 2015, it accuses him of abandoning his portfolio responsibilities.
On Monday, the Coalition came up with the glib phrase that Bowen was now a “part-time minister, full-time president”.
Of course, this is a ridiculous characterisation of the position. Bowen cited a number of examples of ministers in other countries simultaneously carrying out their COP roles while retaining their domestic portfolios. He told parliament that to suggest his new role is a full-time job “is a complete and utter invention, it is a fantasy”.
Ley’s first question to the prime minister on Monday scoffed at government claims that Bowen’s role gave “unprecedented influence” on important international emissions reduction efforts. “Why isn’t this part-time minister, full-time president” using his “unprecedented” influence to lower energy bills for Australians, she asked. The cynicism is breathtaking.
Albanese accused the opposition of “talking Australia down” and ditching bipartisan support for Australians playing key international roles, such as former Liberal finance minister Mathias Cormann, who is now the secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Cormann has been reappointed for a second term, with the government’s support.
Albanese accused the Coalition of failing to address energy shortages and price rises when in government and said their current plan would lead to higher prices because of its negative impact on investment in cheaper renewable energy projects.
The opposition’s other refrain for the week was to ask the government, repeatedly, “When will energy prices come down?” It is a question they cannot themselves answer in regard to their “affordable energy plans”.
Everyone knows the transition to renewables is unavoidably expensive, made worse by almost a decade of Coalition government doing nothing to replace ageing coal-fired power stations.
Ministers avoided providing assurances of early price relief, although Bowen did point to the successful home battery uptake and the way solar panels substantially cut electricity costs for households.
Midweek the new, expanded basket of goods and services included in the monthly consumer price index showed a 0.0 per cent change. That owed more to the fact it was the first in the new series than anything else. More worrying was the annual rate to October rose 3.8 per cent. In Question Time, the opposition avoided tackling Treasurer Jim Chalmers and directed its sole question on the rise in the cost of living to Albanese. It was a curious strategy that suggests it is gun-shy of Chalmers.
Ley reminded the prime minister that earlier in the year he had “promised the Australian people” the country had “turned the corner on inflation” and that the treasurer assured them the government had “inflation under control”.
Albanese is acutely aware of the potency of living costs for voters and accepted that the latest figures “confirm” households are still facing pressures. He noted the withdrawal of state energy subsidies was a contributing factor, but said his government was focused on relief measures and wanted to give assistance.
Chalmers said any decision to continue federal energy bill relief will be made closer to the midyear fiscal review but they can’t be a “permanent feature”. Blunting the opposition’s criticism was its failure at the May election to support the rebates and tax cuts.
Speaking at the National Press Club, shadow treasurer Ted O’Brien attempted to distance the survivors in the Coalition from its ill-fated election policies. He is promising tax cuts next time. His press club address was widely seen as an audition to keep his job should there be a change of leader in the new year.
Cost-of-living issues weren’t worrying Pauline Hanson on Monday night when she served Barnaby Joyce wagyu steaks that retail for about $145 a kilogram. Making the steaks more delicious for both politicians, no doubt, was the fact they came from Gina Rinehart’s cattle company.
Admiration for Australia’s richest person is only one of the things the two right-wing rabble-rousers have in common.
Why Joyce is continuing his flirtation with One Nation and its leader after Hanson’s disgraceful repeat of her burqa stunt in the Senate has his Nationals colleagues shaking their heads. She donned the garment after the Senate refused to allow her motion to ban Muslim face coverings.
This outraged the Senate, particularly its Muslim members. When the Senate resolved to eject Hanson from the chamber, she refused to leave, causing a two-hour suspension of proceedings.
This contempt of the chamber led to Labor, the Greens and some of the cross bench voting to suspend her from the Senate for seven days – a rare event – and from representing the Senate on parliamentary delegations.
The government’s Senate leader, Penny Wong, said Hanson had “been parading prejudice as protest for decades”. Unrepentant, the Queensland senator says she will run again and “the people will judge me at the next election”.
Joyce quit the Nationals on Thursday to sit as an independent for the rest of this term. He is widely expected to head One Nation’s New South Wales Senate ticket at the next election.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 28, 2025 as “Murray Watt’s environmental factors training”.
Kos Samaras (Lobbyist, Consultant, Pollster) Facebook post
A tragedy, yes. A vote converter, maybe but not in the direction some conservatives are hoping for.
Let’s be blunt, the campaign against Albanese, won’t shift the Labor vote in any meaningful way, and it won’t flip Australians who preference Labor ahead of the Liberals.
Yes, plenty of Labor-leaning voters may hold grave concerns about the federal government’s response to the Bondi massacre. And yes, many also believe the Jewish community has carried an unbearable weight of hurt and trauma over the last two years. But the key question isn’t whether they’re angry. It’s who they blame, and whether that anger is strong enough to make them cross tribal lines.
That’s where the modern electorate matters. We’re in an era of psychological sorting: voters are increasingly clustered into ideological ecosystems with their own media, moral cues, social networks, and “good vs bad” political identities. In that world, switching from Labor to Liberal isn’t just a good versus bad cop contest. For many voters it feels like an identity rupture. So when a crisis hits, most people don’t jump across the aisle, they move within their bloc, or they disengage if they are unhappy with the response.
The May 3, 2025 federal election was a live case study. When progressive voters believed the Greens were drifting too close to ugly fringes, including tolerating, excusing, or courting antisemitic currents, they didn’t stampede to the Coalition. They consolidated around Labor. The most symbolic proof: Labor won Melbourne.
So if Labor takes damage over Bondi, it won’t show up as a great Liberal conversion. It’ll show up as within-bloc consequences:
1. Softer enthusiasm and a nastier internal critique. This issue will make Labor’s vote softer but critically the softness is not a red v blue thing.
2. A fraction of Labor voters parking their vote elsewhere on first preferences, while still preferencing Labor ahead of Liberal.
3. In my personal opinion, the most likely long term outcome here. Disengagement, cynicism, switching off. Which is a critical issue for those within the Jewish community and their supporters. The loud noise by conservatives and others, could actually just turn people off because it’s coming across as ultra partisan.
France targets Australia-style social media ban for children next year
Draft bill to be submitted for legal checks as France aims to follow Australia’s world-first ban on platforms including Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Thu 1 Jan 2026 02.31
France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year.
A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has made it clear in recent weeks that he wants France to swiftly follow Australia’s world-first ban on social media platforms for under-16s, which came into force in December. It includes Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
Le Monde and France Info reported on Wednesday that a draft bill was now complete and contained two measures: a ban on social media for under-15s and a ban on mobile phones in high schools, where 15- to 18-year-olds study. Phones have already been banned in primary and middle schools.
The bill will be submitted to France’s Conseil d’État for legal review in the coming days. Education unions will also look at the proposed high-school ban on phones.
The government wants the social media ban to come into force from September 2026.
Le Monde reported the text of the draft bill cited “the risks of excessive screen use by teenagers”, including the dangers of being exposed to inappropriate social media content, online bullying, and altered sleep patterns. The bill states the need to “protect future generations” from dangers that threaten their ability to thrive and live together in a society with shared values.
Will other countries follow Australia’s social media ban for under-16s?Read more
Earlier this month, Macron confirmed at a public debate in Saint Malo that he wanted a social media ban for young teenagers. He said there was “consensus being shaped” on the issue after Australia introduced its ban. “The more screen time there is, the more school achievement drops … the more screen time there is, the more mental health problems go up,” he said.
He used the analogy of a teenager getting into a Formula One racing car before they had learned to drive. “If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don’t want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car.”
Several other countries are considering social media bans for under-15s after Australia’s ban including Denmark, whose government hopes to introduce a ban in 2026, and Norway. Malaysia is also planning a social media ban for under-16s from 2026. In the UK, the Labour government has not ruled out a ban, saying “nothing is off the table” but any ban must be “based on robust evidence”.
Anne Le Hénanff, the French minister in charge of digital development and artificial intelligence, told Le Parisien this month that the social media ban for under-15s was a government priority, and that the bill would be “short and compatible with European law”, namely the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) – regulation intended to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation.
The social media ban is part of Macron’s attempt to shape his legacy as he enters his difficult final year as president with a divided parliament.
On 23 December, last-minute legislation was passed to keep the government in business into January after parliament failed to agree a full budget for 2026. Attempts to agree a budget will resume next month.
A French parliamentary inquiry into TikTok’s psychological effects concluded in September that the platform was like a “slow poison” to children. The co-head of the inquiry, the centrist lawmaker Laure Miller, told France Info that TikTok was an “ocean of harmful content” that was very visible to children through algorithms that kept them in a bubble. TikTok responded that it was being unfairly scapegoated for “industry-wide and societal challenges”.
The French parliament report recommended more broadly that children under 15 in France should be banned entirely from using social media, and those between 15 and 18 should face a night-time “digital curfew”, meaning social media would be made unavailable to them between 10pm and 8am.
The inquiry was set up after a 2024 French lawsuit against TikTok by seven families who accused it of exposing their children to content that was pushing them towards ending their lives.
American Politics
Meidas Touch
Jack Smith, Special Prosecutor, testifies to Congress
Smith: For nearly three decades I have been a career prosecutor. I have served during both Republican and Democratic administrations and I’ve been guided by those principles in every role I’ve held. I continued to honor those principles when I was appointed to serve as special counsel in November of 2022.
The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts.
Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.
Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.
I remain grateful for the counsel, judgment, and advice of my team as I executed my responsibilities. I am both saddened and angered that President Trump has sought revenge against career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff simply for doing their jobs and for having worked on those cases. These dedicated public servants are the best of us, and they have been wrongly vilified and improperly dismissed from their jobs.
I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 Presidential election. We took our actions based on the facts and the law, the very lessons I learned early in my career as a prosecutor. We followed Justice Department policies and observed legal requirements.
The timing and speed of our work reflects the strength of the evidence and our confidence that we would have secured convictions at trial. If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.
Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse <joycevance@substack.com>
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A year of resistance Joyce Vance Dec 31
To mark the final day of 2025, I wanted to share some of my favorite columns from the last year, in hopes that you’ll have time to peruse them here and there over the holiday and the weekend. They are favorites in the sense that they remind me of where we’ve been this past year, the ups and the downs. They are favorites because many of them represent events I’d forgotten in the utter deluge that we endured in 2025, and those reminders are important. They are also favorites because they help me understand how incredibly strong and capable of action we—people who believe in democracy—are. We made it through the devastation of the early days following Trump’s election and inauguration. Early on, there was dawning awareness that it was, in fact, a coup. And now, we’re seriously into the fight to save democracy.
Last year, at this point in time, I wrote to you, “I can’t offer the message of hope and accomplishment I would have liked to be sharing today. The simple truth is that we lost the election, and Donald Trump’s reelection says some devastating things about our country. But I remain hopeful that we can all stick together and get important work done. I still think that civil discourse is the path forward, even though our progress as a nation is not linear.” As it turned out, I wrote a book that used our legal and political history to demonstrate the strength of our institutions and our path forward if we were willing to commit to it. And, we have. Those words ring truer today than ever.At the end of this year, we can look back and see that, as difficult as it was, we are rising to the challenge. We are already in the fight for free and fair elections in 2026, when so much will be on the line. Democracy demands citizen participation, and that means, as painful as it can be at times, we have to stay well-informed and well-educated. We must, to borrow a sports metaphor, keep our heads in the game.
That said, here are some columns that stand out for me as I think about the past year:
January Trump’s Day One Executive Orders How to Push Back Where is this leading?
February A Big Fire Hose Is It Really A Coup? Welcome to the Fight
March Let’s Be Honest About The State Of The Union Deportations: It’s not where it starts, it’s where it ends Wisconsin And, Strangely, Alabama
April Why We Have Due Process Rule of Law?
May Stand Up to the Bully Hamburger Mary’s Goes to the 11th Circuit
June “We are a democracy. But we can lose that democracy.” How We Keep Our Democracy
July Why We Don’t Politicize the Military
August Living in 1984Trump’s “Truth” About Voting Moving the Window
September Paper Clip Protest On Political Violence
October When they Bukele the Courts Are We the Nazis Now?
November What the Frogs Know Quiet Piggy
December Trump on Women The Absence of Decency
As I was reading through old columns and thinking about what the future has in store for us, the House Judiciary Committee had other plans for the last day of the year. They chose this low point in the news cycle, when few people are paying attention, to dump the transcript and video of Jack Smith’s behind-closed-doors testimony on Capitol Hill earlier this month. The transcript runs to 255 pages, and I’ll be taking time over the next few days to digest it so we can discuss. But if you’d like to get a head start on your own, the transcript can be found here. Smith testified that he believed he had proof beyond a reasonable doubt of Trump’s guilt in both the January 6 case and the classified documents prosecution. He told members of the Committee, “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”
2026 is going to be the year that democracy strikes back. And we’re all going to be a part of that! Thanks for your support of Civil Discourse. If you aren’t already a member of our community, I hope you’ll join us. I appreciate your comments, your emails, and the conversations I was lucky enough to have with so many of you during my book tour. I’m confident that no matter the man in the White House, we will bring meaning and renewal to our country’s 250th anniversary in the new year.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
A great argument for London in winter, from Secret London.
You Can Sail Through London Inside A Floating Igloo This Winter – And Feast On Delicious Fondue Whilst You’re On Board
Having drifted onto London’s igloo scene last winter, Skuna’s floating igloos are back for another year of festive fun and fondue.
Katie Forge – Staff Writer
The season to be jolly is very nearly upon us, so it’s time to start jam-packing our diaries with festive fun and frolics. And where better for our seasonal socialising to take place than inside a cosy igloo? Each and every year, a plethora of igloos pop-up across the city, meaning that we’re pretty spoilt for choice. We’ve got rooftop igloos, riverside igloos, and some really rather ravishing igloos. But if it’s a unique winter experience that you’re after, allow us to point you in the direction of London’s only floating igloos.
That’s right, folks: London’s dreamy drifting domes have returned to the capital’s waters, and Londoners can, once again, embark on an aquatic adventure on board a cosy floating igloo this winter.
The Guardian
Thursday briefing: Thirty years of the Women’s prize for fiction – have male novelists been edged out?
In today’s newsletter: As the literary award marks its 30th anniversary, the debate about whether it is relevant when women dominate bestsellers list has resurfaced
Aamna Mohdin Thu 1 Jan 2026 17.45 AEDT Share
Good morning, and happy new year! While there are many exciting celebrations in 2026, for me, none is more special than the 30th anniversary of the Women’s prize for fiction.
Formerly the Orange, and then Baileys prize, this annual award for the best novel in English by a woman was founded in 1996 to rectify a glaring absence: the all-male 1991 Booker prize shortlist.
Times have thankfully changed. The Booker hasn’t seen an all-male shortlist in 20 years, while sensations like Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante have paved the way for stories centering the complexities of women’s lives. Today, heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel, and Bernardine Evaristo share the spotlight with zeitgeist-capturing talents like Ottessa Moshfegh, Elif Batuman, Raven Leilani, and Megan Nolan. Together, they have ensured some of fiction’s most exciting developments are distinctly female-led.
Yet, this success has sparked a heated debate: is the male novelist being pushed out? When David Szalay won the Booker last year for his novel Flesh, this newspaper noted that novels of “female interiority” have dominated the past decade, making stories about young men hard to find.
But is that true? And what seismic changes have there been between now and when the Women’s prize was founded? Today, I speak to Catherine Taylor, a critic who has worked in the industry since 1992 and author of The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time. That’s after the headlines.
In depth: ‘I had to ask permission to write my dissertation on Virginia Woolf’
Amid the 2021 Sally Rooney fervor, which followed the publication of her third novel, a question began to surface regarding the scarcity of young, male writers. A widely discussed article in Dazed asked where these writers had gone and what their absence meant for the publishing world. This was followed by a New York Times piece in 2024, exploring the “disappearance of literary men,” and, in 2025, this culminated in the announcement of a new literary press that would initially focus on male novelists, to find successors to the likes of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
But in the early 1990s, when Catherine Taylor left university and moved to London to do a postgraduate degree, the situation was completely reversed. “All the books were written by Martin Amis,” she jokes. “It was very male-dominated. The atmosphere was about how there needs to be a redress on what was being commissioned, what was coming out and what was not being recognised.”
She recalls specific successful female writers, citing breakout hits like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. However, she notes that several other now well-known names, including Hilary Mantel and Beryl Bainbridge, faced difficulties gaining recognition at the time.
It was a difficult time for women in literature. “When I studied English at university at the end of the 80s, the only female writers on my curriculum were two of the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Jane Austen. And I had to ask permission to write my dissertation on Virginia Woolf,” Taylor says.
A slow-moving revolution
So how did we go from a dearth of female authors 30 years ago, to women consistently on the bestseller list and winning the biggest literary awards? It was a slow process, Taylor tells me.
“It wasn’t an overnight change,” she says, pointing to the work of the Women’s prize as being particularly effective at championing fiction writers, and nonfiction writers.
“I remember being at a Women’s prize event 15 years ago, and a male literary editor, I’m not going to name him, said ‘this shortlist is almost good enough for the Booker’,” she tells me. “It was very patronising. When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker prize with her novel Offshore in 1979, she was described as a ‘lady novelist’. It’s extraordinary to think about this happening throughout my adult life.”
There was also an important evolution of publishing and commissioning, Taylor adds. “The Women’s prize, in terms of winners, was very white when it started out. But as it’s gone on, publishing and appetites have changed. Younger women are coming into publishing and commissioning the books that they want to read, which are much more representative of the world and of readers as well.”
Female domination?
While Taylor applauded the extraordinary efforts that have gone to rebalancing gender disparities in publishing, she pushed back on the idea that we have now reached a saturation point when it comes to women’s writing.skip past newsletter promotion
“Twice as many men as women have won the Booker prize. Exactly twice as many. And when Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize in 2024, she was the first woman to win it in five years,” she says. “The last woman to win the prize solely was Anna Burns with Milkman in 2018. Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo [the first black woman to win the Booker] had to share the prize in 2019.”
When we talk about who’s writing books, it is important to look at how many men and women actually read fiction. According to NielsenIQ BookData, women made up 63% of the fiction books bought in the UK in 2023. But they weren’t just picking up more novels, they were buying more books overall, constituting 58% of all book purchases in 2024. Men do come out ahead when looking at nonfiction, buying 55% compared to the 45% bought by women.
In fact, research commissioned by the Women’s prize in 2024 showed that while women read books by women and men equally, men “overwhelmingly reject” books written by women in favour of male authors. The organisation said the research demonstrated that their mission was just as relevant today as it was when they were founded.
The struggle continues
When I asked Taylor what zeitgeisty novels written about women’s “interior lives” say about women today, she objected to the use of the word interior.
“Nobody calls men’s writing interior or inward when they’re writing about male subjects,” Taylor says.
“Why is it seen that women are writing domestic books?” she says. “Somebody described Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital as quiet. This is an extraordinary book about how human beings are interconnected and how they’re isolated, by using the situation that they’re in – they’re in space. You can’t really get more external.”
Taylor’s own memoir, The Stirrings, was set in the 1980s when she was a teenager, and at the time she thought she was being quite explicit. But she has been so excited by how bold women’s writing is today. “I really love that women are writing about their desires and their needs and the way that they’re interpreting the world through the body and the mind,” Taylor says.
She adds: “Men have used women in novels as objects or as subjects, but in a very one-dimensional way for as long as I have been reading contemporary fiction. Men have also used women’s novels as springboards for their own. I love Martin Amis’s writing. He’s an absolutely brilliant writer sentence by sentence, but I don’t think he would have written London Fields if he hadn’t read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. And I don’t think he would have written Time’s Arrow if he hadn’t read his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard’s book The Long View.”
Taylor says that after Howard’s death, some headlines reduced her to merely being “Martin Amis’ stepmother.” Her obituary in the Guardian echoed this sentiment, observing that she “suffered a certain condescension from literary editors as a writer of ‘women’s novels’.” It’s worth noting that Amis himself went on to credit both Howard and Jane Austen as hugely influential literary figures.
“Why is it seen as interior when we’re talking about things that matter to us?” continues Taylor. “In a world where women and human rights are being rolled back daily, why can we not talk about all these things that have oppressed and continued to oppress and also interest us?”
Robin's Room 