If ‘fiction, of course, began as a female form’, I hope Lisa Gorton will enlighten me. If she knows this, and it constitutes something I overlooked and did not find in years of intense reading, shouldn’t there be more than an ‘of course’ as evidence? Shouldn’t it be the substance of her review? Or does she mean by that ‘of course’ the kinds of things she cut from the long paragraph of mine that she quotes before lamenting my ‘troubling lack of interest in the female of the species’ – despite my referring to women novelists, musicians and painters, anthropologists, biologists, philosophers and psychologists, from Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

I point out in the paragraph she quotes that despite Murasaki, the first novelist and Japan’s greatest writer, despite Jane Austen, the most popular of all classic novelists, and despite J.K. Rowling, the most successful of all children’s writers, males outnumber females as classic and even popular storytellers. But I end that paragraph – and this Gorton does not quote – noting that, although this is true overall in the public sphere, women ‘are the principal tellers of stories, of folk tales and nursery rhymes, to their children’.

Lisa Gorton also writes, ‘What Boyd misses here’ – throughout my discussion of the two storytellers I focus on, Homer, near the start of recorded story, and Dr Seuss, near the start of our individual exposure to stories – ‘is the pleasure of creating art’. Did she miss something? – such as ‘From his youth [Ted “Dr Seuss”] Geisel made the most of his singular ability and inclination to make others laugh. He turned that into his specialty: he worked and worked and worked at play … In 1952, the year before he wrote Horton Hears a Who!, he lamented that most adults lose their capacity to laugh as freely as they did as children, and he set out to remedy the situation. Dr Seuss developed his intense sense of nonsense by rethinking play from the roots of thought up’ – and another score of pages on Dr Seuss’s intense creative efforts and his intense creative exuberance.

Brian Boyd, Auckland, New Zealand

Lisa Gorton replies:

Brian Boyd’s book is a study of evolution and fiction. It is true that he considers the role of women, as mothers, in evolution. We have no argument here. But considering women’s role as mothers does not in my view compensate for overlooking their work as writers.

Women’s writing has been an essential part of the public sphere, following Boyd’s emphasis, for a long time. I was exaggerating when I said that fiction was ‘of course’ a female form, but there is little doubt that Boyd’s book would have benefited from a consideration of women and fiction. Novels have been a vital part of fiction for hundreds of years, and plenty of people would argue that women have dominated this genre. Boyd includes no source for his claim that ‘males outnumber females as classic and even popular storytellers’, so it is hard to assess what he means; but, in any event, a reading culture is not a first-past-the-post system. Some proportional representation would have been in order here.

Readers who have not yet taken the opportunity to buy Boyd’s wide-ranging and interesting book may gain the impression from his letter that his book provides an account of the work of Murasaki, Austen and Rowling. This is not the case. Boyd does not pay significant attention to any female writer of fiction. Aside from one-phrase mentions of Ursula le Guin, Louise Erdrich and Joan Didion. Murasaki, Austen and Rowling are the only three female writers of fiction included in the index, and the book is 540 pages long.

This is its longest account of J.K Rowling: ‘in more mundane currency, J.K. Rowling has captured the imagination of enough people in ten years of writing fiction to earn more than Queen Elizabeth II.’ This is its longest account of Jane Austen: ‘Does this mean that all those who in our own times have read Pride and Prejudice and felt that it reveals something about the danger of false impressions, and the error of equating social ease with merit and social stiffness with coldness or disdain, have been wrong?’ This is its longest account of Murasaki: ‘But this novel, the world’s first, still considered the pearl of Japanese literature, was written by a woman – and a mother.’

Boyd’s letter itself suggests what I find to be a contradiction in his argument. In his book, he argues that more writers are men because men seek high status. ‘Males therefore are overrepresented at both extremes, success or genius, and failure, crime, mental illness, or drug dependency. Despite Murasaki, Austen and Rowling, males outnumber females as classic and even popular storytellers.’ For a start, this suggests that writing provides high status, and that status is a primary motivation to write. However, if pleasure is the primary motivation to write, as Boyd argues elsewhere in his book, then his rationale for men’s (apparent) dominance of genius and fiction seems shaky. In the review, I suggest that Virginia Woolf’s argument in A Room of One’s Own is more compelling.

Brian Boyd’s letter may also give the impression that I dismiss his book in my review. This is by no means the case. I strongly recommend it, in particular for its fascinating account of evolution and the adapted mind.

God of sex

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Malcolm Knox for his mostly favourable comments on my book Messengers of Eros (October 2009). At the risk of sounding churlish, however, I would like to question some of his assertions. He refers to the book as a ‘monograph’. I find the term inappropriate; it suggests a striving after comprehensiveness that, as I make clear, was never my purpose.

Malcolm also seems to imply that, ‘like the man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail’, I fall into ‘solipsism’, if not obsession, and see sex where there is in fact no sex to be seen. But the works I examine in my book all explicitly address sexual issues, and invite the reader to reflect about those issues.

Malcolm disagrees with the importance I attach to sex where the human condition is concerned (‘Bigger than God’, to use his own words) and thinks it’s ‘glib’ of me to point out that the largest category of Internet sites has to do with sex. He asks (rhetorically, I understand), ‘Where does God rank on Google searches?’ Well, the answer is that ‘sex’ returns more than half a billion hits, while ‘God’ returns about fifty per cent of that. This may not prove much, but it does lend some comfort to my argument.

Xavier Pons, Université de Toulouse, Le Mirail, France

Need is the key

Dear Editor,

There is a missing dimension in Ronald A. Sharp’s discussion of mateship in ABR (‘Mateship, Friendship and National Identity’, November 2009), one that has more-or-less dropped out of our thinking since the Cold War and the American alliance made it seem undesirable: i.e. ‘mateship’ is shorthand for a collectivist approach to organising society. It used sometimes to be seen as a species of socialism, a word we no longer dare to use. While America is predicated on individualism, and many older societies function with the family as their basis of organisation, in early Australia the kindness of strangers was the main form of social support, and solidarity in adversity was the only hope of survival. This strengthened the union movement, many mutual organisations and other forms of self-help. It formed the basis of our welfare system and our approach to taxation and the redistribution of income. Friendship has little if anything to do with it; need is the key.

There was great irony in John Howard’s attempt to appropriate this idea. The widespread reaction to it showed that fundamental instincts have survived, though they may no longer be fully understood. As a form of social organisation favouring the collective over the individual or the family, ‘mateship’ is neither gendered nor racially exclusive, though the term itself has these simplistic and misleading connotations. It would probably be a good thing if more Australians understood that it is their form of social organisation that sets them apart, rather than some vague notion of national identity.

Beverley Kingston, Pearl Beach, NSW

Gwen Harwood abroad

Dear Editor,

Gregory Kratzmann is right to assume that Gwen Harwood’s poems have a readership outside Australia (Letters, November 2009). In London, I have been asked about her on a number of occasions by admirers of her work – one, who had visited Tasmania, astonished that there is no memorial to her. Anecdotal evidence, but I hope enough to provide an assurance that the new Carcanet edition – Mappings of the Plane: New Selected Poems – that I spotted recently in a Waterstone’s bookshop won’t dawdle there for long.

Andrew Sant, North Fitzroy, Vic.

Immoral quotation

Dear Editor,

Lyn McCredden’s engaging review of Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986–2008 (October 2009) was marred by a small but significant misquotation. The speaker of J.S. Harry’s ‘mrs mothers day’ suggests that the poem’s addressee entertains a fantasy of her be-ing ‘immortally / impregnated’ by him: ‘sons for ever!’ – and not, as it appears in McCredden’s review, ‘immorally / impregnated’. The Motherlode anthology gives it, accurately, as ‘immortally’.

Kerry Leves, Sydney, NSW