B. G. MacCarthy (1904–1993)

I would give this 6 stars if poss. The cover gives no hint of the widelyread and acerbic read ahead. It's a book I nag friends to try (they are put off by the length, but long is good when it is as informative and funny and constructive as this)

McCarthy covers a couple of centuries of massmarket writing. She is not talking about innovations in literature, because her focus is on women who needed to support themselves, so it is largely about hack writers. They wanted to eat, so their work followed the fashion. You get an interesting perspective on a generation by finding out what stories it wanted to believe about itself, and from that point of view bestsellers are a window on past ideas. With this in mind, McCarthy writes this book. Her summaries of terrible pastoral novels and plays are hilarious, and the biographical data she offers on forgotten authors is compassionately presented - except for Aphra Behn; McC objects to Behn's romantic life and can't see past that. When Woolf said in A Room of One's Own that the history of women's writing had not been written, she was wrong - but this book is sadly obscure.

A pleasure to read.… (meer)