Kate Williams: History's not just for the boys, Dr Starkey
[Kate Williams is the author of 'Becoming Queen: How a Tragic and Untimely Death Shaped the Reign of Queen Victoria' (Hutchinson).]
David Starkey has hit the headlines again, this time protesting against the "feminisation" of history. We women writers, he says, have caused problems. Our enthusiasm for writing about women has distracted readers from what really matters: the men.
It is "bizarre", claims Dr Starkey, that so many books focus on women and wives. When it comes to Tudor history, it should be Henry VIII who is centre-stage. "A proper history of Europe," he insists, would be "a history of white males".
This kind of complaint recurs almost as often as objections from older writers to youthful scribes achieving inflated advances and excessive publicity. Yet every literary party I attend is about 70 per cent male, few of whom appear to be under 35. So unexpected is a female historian that I am usually asked whether I work for a publisher.
When articles appear about the ascendancy of women in history, a few names reappear: Lady Antonia Fraser, Alison Weir and Amanda Foreman. But the fact that Foreman is repeatedly cited when her Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was published a decade ago suggests that there is perhaps not an avalanche of female writers dominating the literary pages.
Georgiana was a deserving winner of the Costa (then Whitbread) Prize for Best Biography in 1998 – but most of the other winners over the past 15 years have explored the lives of celebrated men: Andrew Motion on Philip Larkin, Roy Jenkins on Gladstone, AN Wilson on Tolstoy, Richard Holmes on Coleridge, DJ Taylor on Orwell, Claire Tomalin on Pepys, Hilary Spurling on Matisse. Foreman's book, and John Guy's on Mary, Queen of Scots, are the exception, not the rule.
Moreover, while Dr Starkey confines his complaints to books, most of us derive our notion of history from television. A widely acclaimed history book may sell fewer than 5,000 copies in hardback, but a prime-time history programme might attract more than three million viewers. And television history is undeniably dominated by men – Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama, Tristram Hunt, Tony Robinson, Jeremy Paxman and Starkey himself. Many of us would surely love to watch Lady Antonia or Alison Weir striding around castles, but so far, Bettany Hughes is the only female historian regularly to front her own series...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
David Starkey has hit the headlines again, this time protesting against the "feminisation" of history. We women writers, he says, have caused problems. Our enthusiasm for writing about women has distracted readers from what really matters: the men.
It is "bizarre", claims Dr Starkey, that so many books focus on women and wives. When it comes to Tudor history, it should be Henry VIII who is centre-stage. "A proper history of Europe," he insists, would be "a history of white males".
This kind of complaint recurs almost as often as objections from older writers to youthful scribes achieving inflated advances and excessive publicity. Yet every literary party I attend is about 70 per cent male, few of whom appear to be under 35. So unexpected is a female historian that I am usually asked whether I work for a publisher.
When articles appear about the ascendancy of women in history, a few names reappear: Lady Antonia Fraser, Alison Weir and Amanda Foreman. But the fact that Foreman is repeatedly cited when her Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was published a decade ago suggests that there is perhaps not an avalanche of female writers dominating the literary pages.
Georgiana was a deserving winner of the Costa (then Whitbread) Prize for Best Biography in 1998 – but most of the other winners over the past 15 years have explored the lives of celebrated men: Andrew Motion on Philip Larkin, Roy Jenkins on Gladstone, AN Wilson on Tolstoy, Richard Holmes on Coleridge, DJ Taylor on Orwell, Claire Tomalin on Pepys, Hilary Spurling on Matisse. Foreman's book, and John Guy's on Mary, Queen of Scots, are the exception, not the rule.
Moreover, while Dr Starkey confines his complaints to books, most of us derive our notion of history from television. A widely acclaimed history book may sell fewer than 5,000 copies in hardback, but a prime-time history programme might attract more than three million viewers. And television history is undeniably dominated by men – Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama, Tristram Hunt, Tony Robinson, Jeremy Paxman and Starkey himself. Many of us would surely love to watch Lady Antonia or Alison Weir striding around castles, but so far, Bettany Hughes is the only female historian regularly to front her own series...