Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets

In Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve, which looks at classic literature through data, Ben Blatt conducts his own version of the Bechdel Test: if a novel describes male actions three times as much as female actions, it doesn’t pass. The answer, which will surprise no one, is that almost everything apart from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie fails. He a

Charlotte Brontë explained the decision to use male names: ‘We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.’

‘There had been many years of his life when he was a tall, good-looking man, no gut, strolling about the campus at Harvard, and people did look at him then, for all those years, he would see students glance at him with deference, and also women, they looked at him.’

In 2019 the Emilia Report (named after England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano) analysed coverage of male and female writers and found that women were twice as likely to have their ages referenced – or, in the case of Sally Rooney, her appearance, ‘like a startled deer with sensuous lips’, according to one Swiss critic.

When she was twenty Brontë received a letter from poet laureate Robert Southey saying ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life & it ought not to be.’

This is the first line of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker: My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realised my father hated the legal profession. And this is the opening of Martin Amis’s The Information: Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say nothing.

At their best, puns are a celebration of language’s slipperiness, its lack of control, its multiple meanings and its pleasures. Alexander Pope said that puns speak ‘twice as much by being split’.

To quote the doyenne of the double meaning Dorothy Parker again: ‘There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.’

In Stet Diana Athill describes the literary brainwashing that led men to be taken more seriously: ‘to a large extent I had been shaped by my background to please men … you actually saw yourself as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would