Literary Luminaries: Gender and the Avant-Garde Novelist – Part I | The Weeklings

"WHY DON’T YOU have a beard?” This was a question that a London taxi driver once posited to me. I’d just told him I was a novelist, and he eyed me with great suspicion, questioned my lack of facial hair and then concluded, with authority, “A Proper Author ought to be old, and look jaded, and have a beard.” I pointed out that Jane Austen and George Eliot had managed to pen fine prose despite having hair on their cunts rather than their chins; he merely looked confused.