(The Lack of) Women in "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell"

I'd suggest that anyone doing a blind-reading test would have no idea whether this book was written by a man or a woman. In fact, I'd be willing to bet most people would assume it was written by a man, given that nearly all the major characters are men. As the title may suggest, there were, in fact, no female lead characters in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.  Indeed, author Susanna Clarke is quoted as saying:

I deliberately kept women to the domestic sphere in the interests of authenticity ... it was important that real and alternate history appeared to have converged. This meant that I needed to write the women and the servants, as far as possible, as they would have been written in a 19th-century novel.

Now, that quote is according to wikipedia -- so who knows about the accuracy (the citation is behind some kind of paywall), but regardless of authenticity, the quote is accurate. The female characters in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell were for the most part confined to the domestic sphere, and even moreso, were generally "damsels in distress" and/or "keeping the home fires burning." This is not to say that they were not fully formed characters or realistic humans with great strength, but only that they had little in the way of "agency" and their lives were largely dictated by powerful men. Realistic to the time period (the beginning of the 19th Century), but also intriguing to me through the lens of a year of reading women authors.

At the same time, part of the purpose of reading women authors for a year is to dispel the myths that there are perceptible differences. There are certainly none to be found here. Although this book may be a poor test case, since in everything from marketing to cover design, there seem to be none of the outward marks of the gender-based double standard. The cover design is iconic and bold without any stereotypically gendered colors, and features big text across the front cover (I've read that a big typeface cover design announces that "this book is an event").

So perhaps it's some food for thought that this book -- without any particularly prominent female characters or overt feminist themes, and with its doorstop size -- received the kind of marketing, buzz, and ancillary design that may more typically mark a big, bold debut novel by a man. I'd be curious if the leads were Jessica Strange and Ms Norrell how the reception, marketing, and popularity might have changed.

The fact remains, though, that this excellent work primarily about men and magic got a big push from a major publisher and was a big hit. And it just so happened it was written by a woman. Seems like a win-win to me.