More Women than Men

An interesting piece in this week's Spectator - The Birth of the Walking Book Club by Emily Rhodes (it's on the website, but behind a paywall). Miss Rhodes has set up a book club where - instead of sitting around with wine and takeaway curry and talking about their families - members take a health-giving walk on Hampstead Heath while they actually, you know, talk about books! What's more, these books are not the latest self-nominating 'book club' books but genuinely worthwhile titles from the 20th-century past by writers who are now less fashionable and even in danger of being forgotten - the likes of Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Penelope Fitzgerald. The funny thing is that every writer Emily Rhodes mentions is a woman - but then I'm not that surprised. When I look back at my own reading - specifically at the English novelists I've discovered/rediscovered in recent years - I find the list is overwhelmingly female (keen-eyed readers will note that this post shares its title with an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel I wrote about a while ago). The male novelists are far fewer in number, and almost all American. Does this tell us something? It would surely be a caricature to present 20th-century criticism in England as a story of overinflating male literary reputations while undervaluing equally (or more) talented women novelists - or would it? I've been trying to make a list of 20th-century male English novelists whom I'd regard as underrated, neglected or worthy of rediscovery, and frankly I'm not getting very far... Has anyone got any suggestions? (Not Patrick Hamilton, please.)