Comments on: The Domestic Novel

By: Ray

Ray — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 14:22:41 +0000

If domestic means taking place in the home, then there are millions of domestic novels, many of them award-winners. Probably more novels than there are set in the workplace.
The big problem is that she says she wants novels about happy families, after the wedding and before the adultery, death, or divorce. But what’s her central example? A novel about an unhappy family, where the husband is paralysed, and the wife enters the world of work. D’oh!

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:01:01 +0000

LOL. Excellent rule Gerry.

By: Gerry

Gerry — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:05:19 +0000

surely that’s an objection to Nicole Kidman,. Bit harsh to blame VW for how she is portrayed in a film made years after she’d dead?

Having read the full piece Ben, Craig’s point seems to be that the modern British reader seems to have difficulty in appreciating the domestic novel (this is not an essay btw but something called the Persephone lecture, hence she keeps going on about books they publish).

I think Craig’s main aim was to encourage the publishers to look for more novels from this perspective, Fair enough, but i wasn’t aware of the lack. I am sure if people write good ones people will read them, but it would seem that there is a surfiet of bored middle class housewives writing deathly dull and depressed books about being ethically challenged in owning a SUV (because it’s safer for the kid(s)). I am basing this on this – from the lecture
“Earlier this year, however, two well-known young novelists, Ali Smith and Toby Litt, claimed that the submissions they received for an anthology of new writing were dull, depressed and domestic : as if, they said, “too many women writers had been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape and depressed as hell”

This is breaking my rule of ignoring anything said by a Toby, St John, Piers, or Zac.

By: tom

tom — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:41:43 +0000

“”Happy families are all alike”, said Tolstoy, famously : and erroneously, for those with happy families know that their forms are as varied as the unhappy kind.”

got Mr. Tolstoy bang to rights there. what a superbly pedantic comment.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:41:42 +0000

My principal objection to Virginia Woolf is why Nicole Kidman was given an Oscar for wearing a fake nose to play her in The Hours. She’s an actress, so act for christ’s sake WITHOUT doing the ridiculous nose.
I suppose I liked this line the best “”They show what happens after the wedding bells are rung, and before adultery, divorce or bereavement.”. There is a great drama there. But the big prizes don’t go to those books. Unless they take place in India, or something.

By: Leon

Leon — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 08:31:18 +0000

Are all Jane Austen’s novels significant. I didn’t think Sense and Sensibility was all that great. I wanted the Sensible one to do something reckless as well as the younger one to become less romantic.

Were romantic sensibilities only created in the early 19th century? If so J A must have thought them bizarre.

By: patry

patry — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 03:05:29 +0000

There’s something diminishing about the term “domestic novel,” don’t you think?

By: ben

ben — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 21:59:09 +0000

Virginia Woolf bored for England. Write about the feelings of women in drawing rooms by all means, but that doesn’t give you licence to be deathlessly dreary and dull.

I can think of many books which are rather domestic in setting but are significant indeed — “Pride & Prejudice”, “A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu”, “An Beal Bocht”, anything by Thomas Hardy, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”. Ginny might even have heard of a book called “War and Peace”, which would have completely upset her theory if she had read it by addressing both War *AND* the women in drawing rooms.

Her whining about “denying the domestic novel its place as serious literature” is transparently just self-serving misrepresentation in an effort to defend the god-awful drivvel she put out.