Pink Hearts and Mortarboards by Rosy Thornton

Rosy Thornton is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her academic interests include landlord and tenant and housing law, real property and trusts, as well as feminist approaches to law; she has written and published in those fields. She has also published four novels: More Than Love Letters (2007), Hearts and Minds (2008), Crossed Wires (2009) and The Tapestry of Love (2010).

Visit her site at http://www.rosythornton.com and her faculty webpage at  http://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/re-thornton/80

“Few things are less remarkable than an academic who has written a novel. Not all of them would readily admit it, perhaps, but you can bet your cap and gown that half my colleagues have a dog-eared manuscript under the bed, or a file tucked away somewhere on their hard disc containing an embryonic work of fiction. Some, I know for a fact, have three or four. But if you going to have the effrontery to go beyond writing for enjoyment, to stick your head above the parapet and actually publish a novel, then you’d better make it a Man Booker contender, a searing essay on the state  of post-9/11 society, experimental in style and construction, darkly abstruse in theme. Or, if you absolutely must write to entertain, then let it be detective fiction; crime novels are the accepted light reading of the don on his day off. What you absolutely must not do, under any circumstances, is write commercial women’s fiction.

At this point I should state emphatically that I make no apology for writing novels primarily for a female audience. It is not necessarily even a conscious choice. It is simply that the issues that preoccupy me tend to be those which twist and wind through women’s lives: romantic love, certainly, but also family, fertility and parenting, female friendships, ageing, illness, bereavement and loss; and beyond that, too, the struggle for a manageable work-life balance, community involvement and political activism, and the quest for self-fulfilment through creativity, or through  work, paid and unpaid. If this makes what I write ‘women’s fiction’ – or if it’s also my own gender which makes it so – then so be it.

Within the academic community, however – as indeed to the broadsheet reviewer – women’s fiction is not a thing to be taken seriously. All women’s fiction must be airport romance or air-headed ‘chick lit’; it’s heaving bosoms or it’s sex and shopping. It is a trinket, a bauble, a thing of no weight or substance, to be smiled over indulgently by colleagues, or joked and teased about. I have learnt, if not to apologise for my novels, then at least to shrug them off with some self-deprecating quip – to dismiss them before they are dismissed.

The pretty pastel covers don’t help. I read with sympathetic recognition Elyse Friedman’s essay here in March this year about the packaging the marketing men had assigned to her dark and edgy novels: pink and princess-y, and even a clothesline! My first novel (working title: Asylum) was published as More Than Love Letters in a baby blue cover, sprinkled liberally with little red hearts. Yes, it has comedic elements, and yes, it contains a love story, but it also addresses wider issues, including (this being an academic interest of mine at the time) whether flight from domestic abuse should be a legitimate ground for political asylum. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse commits suicide in a psychiatric ward on page 242 – but it still has hearts and butterflies on the cover. (That’s right, butterflies – when I’m certain there were none in the book.)

My second novel, Hearts and Minds, is a traditional campus novel. The book is a female twist on what is in the UK traditionally a ‘male’ genre, from C.P. Snow and Lucky Jim to Tom Sharpe and David Lodge; it is set in an all-women’s college, but it is still very much a campus satire, full of committee manoeuvrings and political back-stabbings. The central issue of the book is the morality or otherwise of sacrificing academic integrity in order to accept a financial donation. But the cover is bedecked with hearts and flowers – and cute, white doves bearing academic mortarboards in their beaks.

I work in a highly traditional Law faculty which has only employed women teaching staff for the last thirty of the seven hundred years of its existence, and which appointed its first female full professor in 2005. Already my credibility as a hard-edged academic was undermined in many eyes by the course I run in Women and Law, and by my writing about legal doctrine from an avowedly feminist perspective. Now I have completely blown it: I have lost the last shreds of a serious reputation by publishing novels for ‘girls’.

Let them mock. Let them dish out the Barbara Cartland jibes – I’m impervious to their scorn. I believe in what I write; I believe I have things to say about women’s experience and women’s lives. What is so wrong about writing books that people might actually enjoy reading?”

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