How to be both: women, writing, and literary prizes

Not drinking Baileys? Francesco del Cossa's April.

Last week, Nicola Griffith published data showing a gender gap in the books that win big literary prizes. While books that win awards like the Pulitzer and the Man Booker are written by women (although not as many as by men), they are almost never about women. Analysing the pie charts she has compiled, Griffith asks why women appear to have ‘literary cooties’, why women’s experience is a topic without a secure place in the literary establishment, and what strategies could be developed to examine this problem further.

A few days after Griffith's post went viral, Ali Smith won the Baileys Prize (formerly the Orange Prize), an award exclusively for women’s fiction that was set up in 1996. The prize has often been a topic of debate – in 2010, A. S. Byatt deemed it a ‘sexist prize’, and last year, Antonia Fraser suggested that it has become unnecessary, as women are shortlisted more and more for other literary awards. Meanwhile, Eimear McBride, 2014 winner of the Baileys Prize, offered an alternative viewpoint: ‘Part of the pleasure of being on last year's Baileys short-list was the relief of being able to just talk about my work rather than being continually obliged to quantify the relationship of my gender to my work and vice versa.’ In one sense, creating a space exclusively for women’s writing results in an elision of some of the issues at hand. In another sense, creating such a space is a political gesture, drawing attention to the historical implications of a literary environment in which most canonical writers have been male (and white, middle class, heterosexual, cisgender, etc.), and have written about people very similar to them. As Griffith’s research shows, these false norms still act as norms in contemporary writing, or at least the contemporary writing that wins prizes, and therefore the existence of an award like the Baileys remains politically relevant.

Within this context, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both seems incredibly timely. Whereas Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing explicitly addresses female experience from the perspective of a single, unnamed speaker, How to Be Both is a novel about two named characters, Francesco and George. Significantly, both of these characters are read as both male and female during the course of the narrative (apologies in advance for the inevitable abundance of the word ‘both’ in discussing this book). Francesco del Cossa was a real, little known painter of the Italian Renaissance. Smith revives him ­– but as a girl dressed as a boy, a complex figure who also comes to experience twenty-first century Cambridge through the medium of a teenager with an androgynous name: ‘This boy is a girl. I knew it.’

However, Smith doesn’t just turn the boys into girls and leave it at that – gender politics are highly charged throughout the novel, remaining fluid, moving from background to foreground and back again in the fresco style which Smith successfully experiments with in her narrative(s). There is something almost Orlando-esque about Francesco’s journeys through time and relationships with people, whether these relationships be familial, platonic or sexual. However, attempts to draw boundaries between different types of relationship seems to be exactly the kind of action that the novel resists. Instead, it traces the intense connections that can be made between people, overstepping cultural constraints of history, gender, sexuality. George’s mum sees a picture of one of Francesco’s paintings in a magazine, and immediately decides to go to Italy to see it with her children. Francesco forms intimate and yet transactional relationships with a circle of prostitutes, whose faces later make it onto the walls of the Duke of Ferrara's palace. George and H text each other song lyrics and scientific facts translated into Latin, back and forth between Cambridge and Copenhagen.

Steadily, threads unwind and spill out, like ‘a mighty twisting thing fast as a fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook’, or like the seed that leaves an expanding, circular ripple in a pool of urine. Smith maps the two stories onto each other, shifting attention from one to the other, from the painting on the surface to the sketched underneath, and yet constantly maintaining a glimmer of both, a flash of connection, the ends of a story before its start. Ideas of meaning become culturally specific, but also emotional, personal. Mrs Rock recounts the etymology of the word ‘mystery’, something that once ‘meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed’ but now ‘tends to mean something more answerable [...] a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV’. Meanwhile, George becomes ‘so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean’, finding her own way to put things together, to make people notice.

In form as well as in subject matter, Smith questions the usual trajectories of meaning in narrative fiction. Half of the copies of How to Be Both are printed with the modern story at the beginning, the other half with the fifteenth century one. It makes for a reflexive reading experience, both within the novel's covers and beyond them, encouraging contemplation of reading cultures more generally. What does it mean to have a book that doesn’t have a singular beginning and end? What would have happened if the copy had been printed the other way around? I'm glad that my book began with Francesco's narrative. However, I’m planning to lend the book to my mum when I get home, and I think she’d prefer it the other way. Perhaps I could get her to read it from the halfway mark and go back.

It’s strange being able to think about a book in these terms. Not only does Smith create a complicated idea of women’s experience, but also a complicated idea of reading. When positioned as the winner of the Baileys Prize, the novel can be conceptualised more specifically in terms of women readers, both the all-female judging panel, and beyond. Literary prizes produces a goal-driven, top-down model of assessment, a narrative in which prizewinners accumulate to form a history, a club of their own. Somehow, How to Be Both seems to feed into the debates of gender and reading and writing that emerge from discussions like Griffith's, and yet also to refuse to be limited by them.

I’m unsure what the fate of a women-only literary prize will be, and even exactly what it means to have a women-only literary prize. The fact that we’re still having to talk about the presence or absence of ‘female perspectives’ and ‘women’s experience’ in books granted status by the literary establishment is incredibly frustrating, as if ‘women’s experience’ could be unified in this way. Instead, we should be able to talk about gender in all its multiplicities in literature, gender as it intersects with race and class and sexuality and disability. As a winner, though, How to Be Both is (both) effortless and challenging, suggesting that literature is firmly ahead of the structures that attempt to place a value on it. However, that doesn’t mean these structures should stop trying to catch up.