…Although studies reliably find that women read more than men, when a book is written for and consumed by women, or made popular by women, it is seen again as evidence of some fault in the book. Its literary merit is questioned or revealed to have been completely absent all along. Contemporary author Jennifer Weiner, in an acid response to what she labels “Goldfinching,” echoes the same language used by nineteenth-century critics to trivialize the Poetess. “When a book written by a woman summits a certain height of popularity,” she writes, “some highbrow critic will announce that they are not literature at all but, in fact, sentimental trash.”…
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