Why will no one publish the novels of straight white men?

For decades after her death from suicide in 1969, Australian writer Charmian Clift’s work was eclipsed by her husband’s. Clift was married to writer George Johnston, whose classic Australian novel My Brother Jack was published in 1964 to great acclaim.

But for the past few years, a Clift renaissance has been under way, kicked off by the publication in 2020 of A Theatre for Dreamers by British author Polly Samson.

The novel is a sensual depiction of the 1960s bohemian idyll on the Greek island of Hydra, where Clift and Johnston were part of a set of proto-hippies that included Leonard Cohen.

Fascination with this colony of artists and the charismatic, brilliant woman who stood at the centre of it – cooking and entertaining and birthing children and writing through it all – has burgeoned in recent years, fuelled by the reprinting and translation of Clift’s novels.

As reported in the Australian Financial Review this week, every day, three or four people from all over the world wander up the labyrinthine cobblestone streets of Hydra looking for Clift’s house. The AFR quotes Josh Hickey, the head of the Hydra Book Club, remarking that “five years ago, no one knew who Charmian Clift was”.

“They came to Hydra looking for Leonard Cohen’s home … now everyone is looking for Charmian’s house.”

Legendary Australian publisher Jane Palfreyman says this is as it should be.

“Charmian is our very own Frida Kahlo,” she says. “In the same way that Frida has totally eclipsed Diego Rivera … Charmian is riding high, whereas George Johnston is found gathering dust on the back shelves of second-hand bookstores.”

It feels, says Palfreyman, “like a kind of justice”.

A similar kind of justice has been accorded to Elizabeth Jane Howard, the English novelist married to Kingsley Amis at the height of his fame (and legendary alcoholism).

Howard was a brilliant novelist but was overlooked in her lifetime, dismissed as a “women’s writer”. Now, her books, particularly the marvellous Cazalet Chronicles – a saga of upper-class English life which spans the two world wars – are being reprinted at speed to keep up with a younger generation of readers just discovering her.

Meanwhile, Kingsley Amis’ work, and to a lesser extent, that of his son, Martin (whose own writing was encouraged by his stepmother), has been relegated to the genre of Straight White Man’s Novel. And sadly for the Amises, the Bellows, the Roths and the Mailers, not to mention all contemporary wannabe inheritors of the tradition, this once-vaunted body of work is sputtering to its death.

This controversial claim has long been muttered among straight white man writers finding it difficult to sign publishing deals for their literary novels. But it flew out into the open in an essay published in March in the American literary journal Compact.

In it, American writer Jacob Savage, once a screenwriter, now a ticket-scalper, charted the downfall of “The Vanishing White Male Writer”.

Savage conducted a forensic audit of literary prize and “notable novel” shortlists over the past decade or so and found them wanting in straight male whiteness. His conclusion is dramatic: “Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down”.

Savage goes on to argue his case, which is compelling because there is little doubt that in the United States and beyond, including in Australia, the contemporary literary fiction market is increasingly dominated by women and people of colour.

This is not for reasons of charity or self-sabotaging affirmative action on the part of publishers. It’s because literary fiction by women and people of colour is what readers of fiction (the majority of whom are women) want to buy right now.

Savage’s critique is not a cry of self-pity (well, maybe it is a little bit); it is an attempt to explain this phenomenon of increasing female literary dominance and its co-phenomenon, the demise of fiction-reading among men.

The piece startled a lot of commentators and led to some derision, which only served to prove the potency of Savage’s point.

Savage also argued that white male novelists were not producing innovative or fresh work because they were self-censoring according to the laws of Millennial political correctness.

“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” he wrote.

The New York Times examined his claims in its own think-piece, entitled “The Death and Life of the Straight White Man’s Novel”, in which it posed the question of whether we should care if the perspective of the straight white man is hopelessly demode.

We probably should, at least insofar as it conveys interesting shifts in culture. The alienation of the straight white male – particularly the economically displaced working-class men who powered Donald Trump’s voter base – has self-fulfilling political power.

The anomie and anger of these men are being expressed, just not in the novel. Instead, it has spawned its own multiverse – loosely called the manosphere – with podcasters such as Joe Rogan sitting at its apex, and the humiliations of misogynistic porn occupying its gutter.

Straight white men reigned the realm of the English novel for centuries – indeed, they invented it – Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders (by Daniel Defoe) are generally considered the first novels in English. Great female novelists only crept into publishing in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jane Austen published all her novels anonymously, the first under the byline “By a Lady”. The Bronte sisters originally published under male pseudonyms.

Now, the advent of 21st-century postmodern identity politics has profoundly splintered the arts in a million fascinating directions. If reading a novel is a window into another world, then a window into the world of a historically marginalised perspective represents a particularly interesting vista.

Female buyers power the fiction market. As noted in a 2024 NYT article (by a male creative writing university teacher), “over the past two decades, literary fiction has become largely a female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women”.

In her 2019 book, Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of our Lives, Helen Taylor cited research that women account for 80 per cent of the fiction-buying market in the UK, US and Canada. They also constitute most of the patrons of libraries, literary festivals and book clubs.

She quotes novelist Ian McEwan as saying “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead”. In her informal survey of women readers, Taylor found that women often associated reading for pleasure with guilt, self-indulgence and even indolence.

I can attest that the best compliment an author can receive from a female reader is the confession that they “hid” from their family to devour another chapter, or were so engrossed in your book that they ignored their children. And yet, it’s sad too – I wonder if men feel a similar guilt for indulging in their hobbies.

Perhaps it’s not that fiction-writing has become feminised, it is that fiction-reading has. And the moment an activity becomes feminised, it has a tendency to be devalued.

Either that, or, possibly, literary publishing has become a meritocracy, which doesn’t suit everyone.

Jacqueline Maley is a published author, senior writer and columnist. Her latest novel is Lonely Mouth.