When I was much younger, a male friend told me – only half-joking – that the best advice he’d ever been given on chatting up women was to tell pretty girls they’re clever, and tell clever girls they’re pretty. But what would he say, I asked, if he were to encounter a woman who was both? He looked blank; whoever had handed down this pearl had evidently not considered such an unlikely event. Twenty-five years on, I can’t help being reminded of these attitudes and my friend, because of a row in the more rarefied environs of Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Last week, Brontë scholar Nick Holland threatened to resign from the Brontë Society in high dudgeon over the appointment of model and actor Lily Cole as creative partner for the bicentenary celebrations of Emily Brontë’s birth, a decision he described as “rank farce”. His objection, according to a piece he wrote for his website, was that Emily would have been appalled to have her celebratory year associated with “a supermodel”, and that this was all part of a relentless drive to attract a young audience by “being trendy” at the expense of the Brontës themselves. The attack reads very much like a relentless drive by Holland to attract publicity by being deliberately inflammatory; thankfully the pompous suggestion that a beautiful woman, especially one who has made a living from her beauty, couldn’t possibly do this role any justice has been swiftly and mercilessly knocked on the head by numerous writers and columnists.
The controversy is as old as the Brontës, as Cambridge graduate Cole pointed out in her dignified response. It reminded me of the fuss made in 1999, when the announcement that Jerry Hall was to be a judge for the Whitbread book awards was mocked as “blatant dumbing down” by then Booker prize organiser Martyn Goff. But the Whitbread was one of the first literary institutions smart enough to realise that if it wanted to reach a wider audience, it might be a good idea to branch out beyond the same small gene pool of writers, academics and critics, and that a sprinkling of glamour doesn’t hurt – it had Mary Quant as a judge as far back as 1985, and Bruce Oldfield the year after.
Since then, in its later incarnation as the Costa, it has regularly featured faces from stage, screen and fashion – this year’s judging panel includes Laura Bailey and Art Malik – and the other big literary prizes have followed suit. This has had the welcome effect of opening up the literary world, drawing greater media attention to these prizes and the books they honour outside the book review pages, and of making clear that you don’t need a DLitt to enjoy what some might think of as dauntingly “serious” books. All the recent hand-wringing over the declining sales of literary fiction suggests it’s more vital than ever not to create artificial distinctions around certain kinds of writing that might make people feel it’s not for them.
And yet, I can’t help a tiny pang of sympathy for one of the points Holland made, buried beneath the blustering intellectual snobbery. “The person chosen for such an important role as creative partner [should have been] a writer,” he says. Leaving aside the fact that Cole’s project is to create a short film, and that the Brontë Society is working with musicians, visual artists and film-makers as well as writers on the bicentenary celebrations, I agree – it would be nice if there were a writer who could have brought the same reach and cachet as Cole. But who? Zadie Smith, maybe? I would love to live in a culture that celebrated writers as much as it elevated TV stars, models and singers, so that the literary world didn’t have to rely on borrowed glamour, but alas we don’t. Writers are not celebrities here in the way they often are elsewhere, and that says a great deal about our cultural values. The Swedish crime writer Camilla Läckberg appeared on Sweden’s version of Strictly Come Dancing a few years ago; it’s hard to think of any British novelist – with the possible exception of JK Rowling – who would be regarded by producers as having the necessary profile to qualify here.
I’m all for breaking down the preconceptions that would keep Great Literature ringfenced in the way Holland would like, the preserve of a qualified few, and Cole’s appointment is an inspired step towards that. But I’d also like to see the dismantling of boundaries cut both ways; perhaps, by the tricentenary, there’ll be a writer with enough kudos to draw the big crowds.
• Stephanie Merritt writes as SJ Parris. Her most recent book is Conspiracy
