The curse of the cool girl novelist - New Statesman

Her prose is bare, her characters are depressed and alienated. This literary trend has coagulated into parody.

When George Eliot wrote her merciless takedown of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in 1856, she did not intend the genre to survive her attack. This wasn’t a mere hatchet job, where the axe takes out a few chunks from the body only for the thing to stagger on, but a complete decapitation inflicted by a sharpened machete. How vexed Eliot would be to learn that this monstrous genre has recently grown a new head. In their 21st-century guise these novels inevitably look different, but bear the unmistakable marks of the original silly breed diagnosed by Eliot: they mistake “vagueness for depth, bom

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