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“Women and men have long been presumed to maintain different reading habits and sensibilities, and the novel has always straddled the fault line of those differences. The question of who the female reader is — and what she wants — is in some ways built into the novel itself, whose reach as an art form expanded at exactly the same time as a female audience with the education and leisure time to read it. What’s interesting are the ways in which constructions of the female reader are both entrenched and shifting, constantly causing new fault lines to appear. In the 18th century, for example, women were assumed to like narrative, and men read for ideas; in the 19th century, women were thought to like detail and digression, while men read for the narrative point.” Read more from Alix Ohlin’s essay “Reader, You Married Him: Male Writers, Female Readers, and the Marriage Plot” at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“Women and men have long been presumed to maintain different reading habits and sensibilities, and the novel has always straddled the fault line of those differences. The question of who the female reader is — and what she wants — is in some ways built into the novel itself, whose reach as an art form expanded at exactly the same time as a female audience with the education and leisure time to read it. What’s interesting are the ways in which constructions of the female reader are both entrenched and shifting, constantly causing new fault lines to appear. In the 18th century, for example, women were assumed to like narrative, and men read for ideas; in the 19th century, women were thought to like detail and digression, while men read for the narrative point.”

Read more from Alix Ohlin’s essay “Reader, You Married Him: Male Writers, Female Readers, and the Marriage Plot” at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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