The Big Question: Is Muriel Gray right... do female writers today lack imagination?

Why are we asking the question now?  

Muriel Gray, novelist, television presenter and this year's chair of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which male writers are not eligible), accompanied the announcement of the longlist with an accusation that, by and large, the writers this year's panel assessed lacked imagination, and focused too narrowly on their own lives and personal issues.

Women writers don't work hard enough to escape from their own gender and circumstances - in short, says Gray, they're failing to make things up, surely a prerequisite for good, absorbing fiction. She's coined a phrase, rural schoolteacher syndrome, to describe the phenomenon: "the delusory condition that fools the sufferer into believing that an experience, say as ordinary as being a rural school teacher, is so interesting and unique that it's almost compulsory to chronicle it ... thinly disguised as fiction".

Meow! Isn't that a bit anti-feminist of Gray?  

It might seem odd for a chair of a prize celebrating women's fiction, but she was careful to position her remarks in the context of the "more level playing field" for women's writing that has been created in part by the Orange Prize. The prize was necessary, not because women writers were "different or inferior, but because the publishing world, the media and the marketplace treated them as if they were", said Gray. Must try harder, girls.

Has the issue been raised before?

Yes, in 2005, when the novelists Toby Litt and Ali Smith edited the annual Arts Council Anthology of new writing. Their contention that "the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk taking", was hotly debated and widely condemned. As the novelist Jane Rogers pointed out, though their criticism was levelled only at the writers who submitted work for the anthology, as soon as it was aired it began to be applied to all women writers, living and dead, "which is why it is such a damaging claim to have made".

Similarly, though Muriel Gray was referring only to the books under consideration for the Orange Prize - and anyone who has had to judge a major prize will confirm that you have to wade through an awful lot of sludge in hard covers - comments like this tend to get applied to women writers en masse. And the media loves any hint of a cat-fight; criticism of women by other women is particularly piquant.

Is there any truth in the accusation?

There's no pre-ordained reason why women's fiction and domesticity should be linked. One of the earliest novels written by a woman in English, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (c1688), is the gripping tale of an African prince who is captured by an English slaver, based on its intrepid author's voyages in Surinam. Yet the notion that women writers are primarily domestic - and therefore inferior - was once a staple argument in favour of the dead white male canon, at least until feminist readings opened up formerly belittled texts and exposed the self-serving, chauvinist nature of much male criticism.

It would take a brave critic to argue that Jane Austen's work - described self-deprecatingly by the author herself as "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush" - should be devalued purely because of its domestic setting (although there is debate over Austen's avoidance of the slave trade and the Napoleonic wars in her fiction). Sylvia Plath's only novel sticks very closely to her experiences as a troubled American college girl, yet who would deny the wit, insight and brilliant descriptive power of The Bell Jar?

You only have to look at the works of J K Rowling and Susanna Clarke, both of whom have meticulously imagined alternative worlds, to realise that "making stuff up" is still well within the capability of women writers. Yet both these writers have suffered a slight stigma for their work - that it's "only" fantasy. Clarke's popular book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, was an enormous achievement which missed out on the major literary prizes. Maybe it was too much fun.

Don't male writers write thinly veiled autobiographical fiction too?

Of course, and they don't get marked down for it. In Edward St Aubyn's justly celebrated quartet of novels about the Melrose family, Patrick Melrose's trajectory through life is uncannily similar to the author's - though admittedly, spunking loads of money, doing tons of drugs and hobnobbing with the Royal Family is considerably more interesting to read about than is, say, the heroine sponging baby sick off her shoulder.

Male writers have also done very well out of so-called "domestic" fiction, too - just look at Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons, not to mention Flaubert with Madame Bovary. And Portnoy's Complaint certainly never did Philip Roth any harm, however much it is said to have embarrassed his mother and delighted his father.

Should 'escaping from your gender' be one of the key roles of fiction?

It is strange to see Gray citing this as a self-evidently good thing. Generally writers, male or female, are not at their best when cross-dressing. It's unconvincing at best, absurd or embarrassing at worst - remember Martin Amis's female police officer in Night Train? Or Sebastian Faulks's Charlotte Gray, perpetually fiddling with her historically researched underwear? If anything, male writers are worst at this, tending to fall into the "adjusting my thong and wondering whether it is time to change my tampon" trap.

So is it a bad year for the Orange Prize for Fiction then?  

By no means, though there are a couple of books on the longlist that seem to bear out Gray's thesis - Rebecca Gowers' When to Walk and Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park are both pretty domestic, as presumably is a novel entitled The Housekeeper. But with authors of the calibre of Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley, Margaret Forster, M J Hyland and Jane Harris on the list, it looks set to keep readers - male and female - happily curled in their armchairs.

Perhaps the other Big Question might be: with one Man Booker winner (Kiran Desai), one Whitbread Book of the Year winner (Stef Penney) and a Man Booker shortlistee (Hyland) all on the longlist, do we really need the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (by women) any more?

Are female writers different from male writers?

Yes...

* Women authors often concentrate on the domestic sphere, which men generally ignore

* Women are called upon to write romances and men are asked to write adventures stories, to satisfy the market for these genres

* Women's writing tends to subvert the male status quo, as in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

No...

* Cultural factors such as wealth, status and nationality are more important than gender these days

* The Brontës and George Eliot originally published as men - without anybody guessing the truth

* Beyond the personal sphere, human experience is universal and writers cannot help reflecting this reality

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