Reading women

If you’ve read my article on representation of women authors and protagonists on the exam set texts lists in the UK at 16, you’ll know the picture isn’t that great, and students are likely to be mainly encountering a man’s eye view of the world in all contexts of literature. If not, read it, it’s open access!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pros and cons of reading lists recently, but I loved a reading list as a teenager, and I was very pleased to find out that my tweeting of the Balliol college reading list for aspiring Oxford English students sent it semi-viral in 2016. (Have a look – it’s a surprising list.) So as an accompaniment to my article on set texts, I thought I’d make a list of six suggested reads by women for teens who want to balance up their school curriculum texts (or anyone else!).

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison. This Gothic modern classic is the story of an African-American woman who escapes slavery only to be taken back. Rather than allow her 2 year old daughter to return to slavery, she kills her, and this is the story of her haunting by Beloved, who may or may not be that daughter. A powerful novel which won many prizes.

2. The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor. A modern SFF novel (or ‘magical futurism’) which links the US and Africa, this is about the rise of a superhuman woman and also about our world and what we are doing to it and its peoples.

3. Anita and Me by Meera Syal. Now this technically is a GCSE set text but it doesn’t appear as widely as it used to and given that everyone has to study a 19th century novel, I suspect the vast majority will be doing a 20th/21st century play rather than another lengthy prose text. Anita and Me is a fabulous Bildungsroman set in Wolverhampton, an area of Britain that gets little attention in literature. Anita is the kind of friend everyone wants and fears.

4. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. This was one of my favourite reads of 2017. It’s a dual timeline story, of a diary written by a teen in Japan, and the woman reading that diary in the US after it is washed up on a nearby beach. It’s not for the faint of heart – and I would be careful recommending it to teens given it has sex and swearing in it in abundance, but perhaps the uncomfortable context of Japanese fetishism of schoolgirls has lessons for all of us. It’s beautifully written and another powerful read.

5. The Shadow of the Sun by A.S. Byatt. I debated what Byatt novel to include, and Posession came a close second – a novel I read and fell in love with at 17. The Shadow of the Sun came about a year later, and it is definitely a challenging read – perhaps of particular interest to those aiming at a high status university. It’s the story of what happens when a high flying young woman comes to pieces. I hope the ending would be different nowadays – but it’s a useful reminder that the choices young women have now were not always available to them.

6. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Another Gothic mystery, this one centres on the dialogue between two women, one a famous novelist who is dying and the much younger woman to whom she has finally chosen to reveal the key to the mystery which has been at the heart of her life and work. It’s BRILLIANT. And much better than the television adaptation from a few years ago.

What would you recommend?

Tobin's 'Narrative Rug Pull' and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Vera Tobin, in an article called 'Cognitive bias and the poetics of surprise' explores the role that 'cursed knowledge' plays in the way we experience narrative surprises. 'Cursed knowledge' refers to the fact, well established by experimental psychology, that humans cannot help but conflate their own knowledge with that of others - ie we tend to think that because we know something, other people do to. The classic experiment to show this is Elizabeth Newton's tapping experiment. When someone is asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song and then estimate how likely it is that a listener will be able to identify the song, they massively overestimate the chances. Tappers put the expected success rate at about 50% - in fact it's only 3%. This applies to fiction too - we can forget that privileged knowledge that we have as readers is not available to the characters, which creates a surprise when they act apparently irrationally; but we can also forget that they may have information which we do not, particularly when they are apparently telling us everything.

The satisfying twist, argues Tobin, rests on this.

An entirely unpredictable narrative element frequently qualifies not as a satisfying twist, but as an unsatisfying non sequitur. A narrative that would avoid this pitfall must include some elements early on that are endowed with some significance that will only be visible later. However, this significance must, in retrospect at least, seem to have been available from the start, or, when the reader looks back, she or he will not be satisfied. (Tobin, 2009, p. 157)

This is what Tobin identifies as the narrative rug-pull  - an authorial trick which undermines expectations but keeps the reader content that this undermining has been done 'in the spirit of fair play' (p. 157). \This is of course particularly important in detective fiction. Such a twist means that the reader has to reinterpret the information which they already have in a way that changes their entire understanding of the situation.

Tobin gives the following quotation from Dorothy L. Sayers to sum up this dilemma for the mystery writer:

The reader must be given every clue - but he must not be told, surely, all the detective's deductions, lest he should see the solution too far ahead. Worse still, supposing, even without the detective's help, he interprets all the clues accurately on his own account, what becomes of the surprise? How can we at the same time show the reader everything and yet legitimately obfuscate him as to its meaning? (Sayers, 1929, p. 97)

The embedded perspective

So, Tobin argues, the author can take advantage of the curse of knowledge by aligning a narrative with an embedded viewpoint - a strong narrator, in other words, so that the reader strongly identifies what they know with what the narrator knows - or claims to know. The stronger the belief in the narrator's perspective, the 'more vulnerable he or she will be to a narrative rug-pull. This is why unreliable narrators remain and especially dependable resource for setting up this kind of surprise twist' (Tobin, 2009, p. 166). And Dr Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a particularly unreliable narrator!

Tobin reports that the twist at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd created 'genuine sensation' when it was published (p. 166) even though it wasn't the first time this kind of structure or revelation had been used in crime fiction. (She suggests Poe's 'The Tell Tale Heart' as a comparator.) She quotes two contemporary reactions:

Willard Huntington Wright (1927): 'the trick played on the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is hardly a legitimate device of the detective-story writer'
vs
Dorothy L. Sayers (1929): 'this opinion [Huntington Wright's] merely represents a natural resentment at having been ingeniously bamboozled. All the necessary data are given.'

Because Dr Sheppard is the narrator, Tobin argues, the reader's perspective is strongly aligned with his, which enables the surprise at the end. She suggests it is particularly unsettling for the reader to discover that a trusted narrator has been unreliable - in other words, when what we thought we knew, turns out to be a drastic misinterpretation of the facts.

There is a further reason, Tobin suggests, that this twist is so effective in this case:

Another reason that Christie's version of this twist was so effective and surprising, of course, was the way that it played on other conventions of the genre. The narrator of Roger Ackroyd fills a conventional role, that of the faithful sidekick exemplified by Dr John Watson, the friend and confidant of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective Sherlock Holmes. As the narrator of the Holmes stories Watson serves as both the detective's assistant and the reader's proxy. He is clever enough to follow Holmes' reasoning when it is explained to him, but never so excessively brilliant that the explanation would be unnecessary. He is capable and faithful; if he were not, the perceptive Holmes would surely not rely on him. (Tobin, 2009, p 167)

As a result, we trust Sheppard because we think we know who he is - not in terms of the narrative, but in terms of the genre in which that narrative falls.


Tobin, V. (2009) 'Cognitive bias and the poetics of surprise', Language and Literature 18 (2), pp. 155-172