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A recent article in The Guardian, "Jodi Picoult Attacks Favouritism to 'White Male Literary Darlings'," has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in the book world. Lesley McDowell, author of Between the Sheets: The Literary Liasons of Nine 20th Century Women Writers, knows the feeling all to well. She shared her thoughts on the article--and how she thinks demographics can affect the gatekeepers of publicity, book reviewers--below. Thanks, Lesley!

When I stepped out of the world of academia in 1997 and into literary journalism, I had a mortgage and bills to pay. I needed to make money. So I took a look at the literary pages and thought, hmmm. No-one’s going to let me review the latest Martin Amis. Or the latest Salman Rushdie. Or the latest Ian McEwan...I could see I just didn’t have the right equipment for the job, despite a PhD on James Joyce.

Fortunately, though, I did have the right equipment to review the latest Jane Smiley. Or Carol Shields. Or Alice Hoffman. The women writers that the boys won’t touch with their barge poles. But that was fine by me – what they didn’t want, I took gratefully and all those reviews of all those superb women writers paid my mortgage and my bills. They still do. And I still don’t get the big boys to review – the latest Amis or Rushdie or McEwan goes, by and large, to lead male reviewers. I didn’t care, back in 1997. I built my own little ghetto and I was just fine with that. I needed the cash, plus I got to read some of the best literature that the late twentieth century had to offer.

And now? I do occasionally review a book by a man. Just as some male critics do very occasionally review a book by a woman (of the 26 reviews I’ve received for my own book, Between the Sheets, four – yes, 4 - have been by men). But I like pushing for the women writers – I see it as my job to give them attention they might otherwise be denied if a literary editor can’t find another female critic to review them in time. The financial pressure is still there, but I don’t see my reviewing, or the books I review, as part of a ghetto any more.

And yet that sense of a ghetto is still there. I’m guessing that Michiko Kakutani didn’t face quite the same financial pressures I did, when she began building her career as a major literary critic. I’m guessing she could afford to badger for the boys’ books, maybe wait till that important male reviewer was off sick and she could steal the latest Amis for herself. I’m not saying I never reviewed a lead title, but the lead titles are invariably by male authors, so if you want to be a major reviewer, you tend to have to concentrate on the boys. And so, I’m guessing, that’s what Kakutani did. It got her the status she has today.

So why would she take a step down and review the latest Jodi Picoult? Jodi Picoult, for heaven’s sake! What does she know about family drama? Nothing that Jonathan Franzen doesn’t know much, much better, it would appear. Women have been writing about the family for decades, and been castigated for it, marginalised as frivolous, domestic, local. Occasionally a woman writer is accorded proper status – oh, how it pains

The Miami Herald reviews Leslie McDowell's Between the Sheets, a provocative study of nine women authors and their literary liaisons: "Power that once belonged to male gods alone, they took for themselves. So proclaims Scottish author Lesley McDowell about nine 20th century female writers in her distaff version of the Prometheus myth distilled into a modern and accessible literary study. In McDowell's feminist account, Katherine Mansfield, H.D. (Hilda Doolitle), Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath are heroines who snatch literary fire for themselves and - by extension -- other women writers.

McDowell's approach to her subject is governed by what, in her view, has characterized love relationships between all men and women since the dawn of time: a struggle for power.' Though much has been written about some of the relationships covered here -- Nin and Henry Miller, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Plath and Ted Hughes -- McDowell offers an original framework through which to view these often unequal partnerships. She believes that the writers under discussion voluntarily decided to endure all manner of hardship with difficult and even abusive men, because the payoff would be apprenticeship to experienced and well-connected authors able and willing to shepherd them to literary greatness. As such, we shouldn't view these women as hapless victims but rather as clear-eyed realists who gave their literary pursuits precedence over all else."

Lesley's McDowell's new study of the literary liasions of nine influential 20th women writers, Between the Sheets, is reviewed in the April 4 issue of The New York Times Book Review: "McDowell, a literary journalist in Scotland, has culled incredibly juicy details. With so many affairs and broken hearts, the most suprising thing is that anything got written in the last 100 years."

Featured in Between the Sheets:

Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
H.D. and Ezra Pound
Rebecca West and H.G. Wells
Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford
Anais Nin and Henry Miller
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway
Elizabeth Smart and George Barker
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Critic, novelist, and literary journalist Lesley McDowell has written a fascinating new exploration of the literary liasions of nine 20th century woman writers, Between the Sheets. Here a preview in Kirkus Reviews: "Writers such as Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West and Jean Rhys have long been considered essential to the development of modernist literature and the rise of feminism. In her nonfiction debut, McDowell (The Picnic, 2007) draws another connection—each was paired romantically, with varying degrees of success, to other significant writers of the time. Examples include H.D. and Ezra Pound, West and H.G. Wells, Nin and Ford Madox Ford, and Nin and Henry Miller. Certainly, this is a tradition not limited to the modernist movement. Writers and artists have long been drawn to one another, complicating the concept of the muse versus the creator. McDowell successfully pins down particular parallels in her chosen relationships that are especially significant to their artistic goals. It is notable, for example, that these women are largely known as the victims of their relationships. They were, for the most part, all deserted or rejected by their husbands and lovers, often in a particularly public manner, or forced to participate in humiliating or degrading relationships. Each reacted dramatically to their failed relationships—Plath taking the most drastic road by committing suicide after Ted Hughes' affair. McDowell questions the degree to which these women pined for their respective men, while also espousing the virtues of feminism and independence in their writing, hinting at what was often blatant hypocrisy. But she also speculates on the ways in which the men—ironically mostly less famous in death than their partners—were able to provide the women with professional inroads, and also served as inspiration for some of their most influential works. The information is hardly new, but McDowell contextualizes it well, giving solid insight into a dynamic and influential group."

Just releasing is a new book the explores the literary liasons of nine women writers: Between the Sheets. Author and critic Lesley McDowell explores nine famous literary liaisons of the twentieth century and examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners these women felt themselves to be. Here's a sampling of early opinion: