7 - Realism, Romance and Self-reflexivity: Twenty-first-century Middlebrow

Summary

What do women read in twenty-first-century France? If reading has declined in the face of competition from an increasing number of alternative media (Donnat, 2011, 2), it still remains a widely shared leisure activity: a 2014 national survey by the Centre National du Livre showed that 70 per cent of the French population reads at least one book per year, a figure unchanged since 1973 (Donnat, 2011, 3), and that 26 per cent of the French population reads more than 20 books per year, a 9 per cent rise in this category since 2008 (Donnat, 2008, 6). Sixty-one per cent of these ‘big readers’ (‘gros lecteurs’) are women. Women read more than men, and they show a much stronger taste for literary fiction: although detective novels figured in the top five book categories for both sexes, it was only on the women's list that ‘contemporary novels’ appeared as a preferred genre. Women said that they read primarily for leisure and relaxation, as well as ‘to discover other worlds and points of view’: this suggests fiction, whereas a majority of the men surveyed named ‘extension of knowledge’ as their primary motivation for reading. Women, according to a 2010 survey (‘Qui lit quoi?’, 2010), make up over two-thirds of France's fiction-reading public.

Of course women's reading tastes are not limited by the author’s nationality or sex. France is one of Europe's leading publishers of translations and among these almost 60 per cent are literary (Literature across Frontiers, 2010); any list of bestsellers confirms that the French reading public happily accepts novels in translation. Women read male authors, as their strong taste for policiersconfirms: the detective novel remains a largely male-authored genre despite its many female stars from Agatha Christie to France's Fred Vargas. It nonetheless remains true that women read women, and the substantial number of women authors in contemporary France who combine serious, topical themes with accessibly pleasurable narrative – and thus qualify as middlebrow – is testimony to this, many of these attracting warm appreciation from women readers (in blogs, online discussion boards, at book-signing events) and, in equal measure, indifference, suspicion or condescension from critics.