Women's studies

Chick lit is often dissed for being trashy and dumb. Back off! These novels of fashion and family are recording women's history.

By Rebecca Traister

Nov 1, 2005 | A harsh media spotlight has been trained on 28-year-old Lauren Weisberger since this month's publication of her second novel, "Everyone Worth Knowing." The $1 million follow-up to the bestselling "The Devil Wears Prada" tells the tale of a 27-year-old New Yorker who quits her finance job to become a publicist, allows her boss to whore her out to a repellent closeted playboy, and falls for the paid consort to a married socialite. (Along the way she learns a lot about luggage, nightclubs and the brand names of jeans.) The complaints that the book's mostly female critics have expressed -- that it is "fatuous" and "lackluster" -- mirror complaints about the literary vogue that produced it: chick lit.

For example: A New York Times joint review of "Everyone Worth Knowing" and Candace Bushnell's "Lipstick Jungle" noted, "It's refreshing, in the pool of chick lit, to float in the Machiavellian head-space of ruthless women for whom 'the rules' have nothing to do with husband-hunting." The New York Observer published a piece calling "Everyone Worth Knowing" "a perfect representative of this dusty, overly familiar and perhaps occasionally appealing genre" and cataloging chick lit's clichis: "A newly engaged best friend? An obsession with the Styles section? Bad takeout dinners and large, sugary drinks? These types of books have affected even the way New Yorkers see New York." (The Observer, where I used to work, played a significant role in creating a market for "these types of books" by publishing a column by Bushnell in the mid-'90s called "Sex and the City.")

Of course, chick-lit beat-downs are nothing new. In the decade or so that the genre has been popular, we have heard a repeated chorus of despair: that chick-lit novels like "Everyone Worth Knowing" are reducing literary heroines to shallow, one-dimensional clichis of urban femininity -- cosmos and clotheshorses and gays. Yet, Weisberger did not invent chick lit, nor is she particularly emblematic of it. "The Devil Wears Prada" was a hit not because of its revelations about single womanhood (the hallmark of the chick-lit genre) but because it dished dirt about Weisberger's former boss, Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Still, once the author had blown her insider wad, she decided to cash in on a hot genre, a decision that worked out well for her: She already has an advance for book No. 3.

Of course, at this point, we shouldn't be surprised by the treatment of Weisberger and her peers. Beating on "women's" fiction -- and dismissing certain literary trends as feminine rubbish -- has a history as long as the popular fiction itself. When the English novel was born in the 18th century, in part to feed a new readership of middle-class women, critics moaned about the intellect-eroding effects of sentimental fiction.

Irish writer Richard Steele, co-founder of the London periodical the Spectator, wrote in that publication in 1711 about someone whose "Brains are a little disordered with Romances and Novels." In 1747, English statesman Lord Chesterfield referred in a letter to "poets, romance, and novel writers" as "sentiment-mongers." Fictional prose was considered lightweight stuff: imaginative, fanciful, fluffy ... feminine.

Many of the earliest English novelists (Defoe, Richardson and Fielding) are held in high literary regard today, but we hear less about some of their popular female contemporaries, whose fiction was regarded with even more skepticism than most. A footnote in T.J. Mathias' 1798 satiric, reactionary poem "The Pursuits of Literature" mocks a batch of popular women writers, including sentimentalists like Charlotte Smith and the soap operatic Elizabeth Inchbald, calling them "ingenious ladies, yet they are too frequently, whining or frisking in novels, till our girls heads turn wild with impossible adventures..."

One early female English novelist to receive critical acclaim was Ann Radcliffe, whose formulaic gothics -- full of hermits, barons and pious women trapped in crumbling castles -- were bestsellers. Radcliffe was paid a then-staggering (Weisberger-esque) 500 pounds for her fourth novel, "The Mysteries of Udolpho," in 1794; 800 for her fifth, "The Italian," which she wrote when she was 33. Radcliffe, whom Walter Scott called "the first poetess of romantic fiction," inspired legions of imitators who were savaged by critics in a way that should be familiar to anyone who remembers the critical annoyance over the repeated aping of Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones's Diary" in the late 1990s. (A 1999 London Times review of a new chick-lit title began with the sentence, "I blame Helen Fielding.")

But without Mathias' "frisking" women or Radcliffe and her mimics, we would likely not have "Jane Eyre" or "Frankenstein" or Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait," which name-checks Radcliffe. We would certainly not have the same body of work by Jane Austen, who was influenced by Smith and Inchbald, and whose "Northanger Abbey" sends up and pays homage to "The Mysteries of Udolpho."

Even as it became clear that the novel was a literary form that was here to stay, critical hand-wringing did not abate. In fact, as more women threw their pens in the ring, it worsened. According to the Ladies Repository in 1845, "It is romance reading, more than everything else put together, that has so universally corrupted the tastes of the present age. If a man writes a book -- a work of profound study and solid merit, no body will read it." "Middlemarch" author George Eliot (nee Marian Evans) performed a merciless evisceration of her Victorian contemporaries in an 1856 essay called "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," an essay that really has to be read to be appreciated, but which begins with her scorn for "the frothy, the prosy, the pious, [and] the pedantic" qualities of women's fiction that make up the "composite order of feminine fatuity." Mocking the clichi-laden plots of these silly novels, Eliot writes: "feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted heroine pass through many mauvais moments but we have the satisfaction of knowing that ... her fainting form reclines on the very best upholstery, and that whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming ... than ever."

Next Page: Teen chick lit, lesbian chick lit -- even chick lit about conjoined twins!

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