Non-Fiction Narratives

Considering the work of Rachel Carson & the new Women's Prize for Non-Fiction

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Last week an announcement was made that, following on from the success of the Women’s Prize for Fiction launched in 1996, there is to be a new Women’s Prize for Non-fiction, due to be awarded by the Women’s Prize Trust in 2024.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction was created as a response to the lack of women on the shortlists for major book prizes.  The new non-fiction prize will be awarded to a woman non-fiction writer writing in English and published within the UK (though the writer can be from anywhere across the globe). The winner will be awarded prize money of £30,000 as well as a statuette “the Charlotte” donated by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, set up by former literary agent Gillon Aitken in memory of his late daughter.

Founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kate Mosse, stated that this wasn’t an award designed to take away anything from the ‘brilliant male writers’, but was instead about ‘adding the women in’.

Women have historically been absent from many non-fiction prizes.  According to statistics collated by the Women’s Prize, examining seven major UK non-fiction prizes, only 35% of winning non-fiction books over the past decade have been awarded to female writers.  Further, though plenty of non-fiction books written by women are being published, they often go on to sell less, and are reviewed less often.  This new prize, it is hoped, will go some way towards redressing the balance.

Much of the lack of nominations for women’s non-fiction lies in the fact that certain types of non-fiction writing are published less frequently by women than by their male counterparts.  There are often less women writing within areas like business and economics, for example, as opposed to the large proportion of women non-fiction writers in subjects such as literature.  This reflects the substantially larger number of female scholars within the humanities, rather than, say, the sciences.

There has also been the issue of the ‘importance’ placed on many of the subjects covered in non-fiction works by men.  Women’s writing has a history of being referred to critically as featuring more interest in the ‘domestic’ than in world events, for example.  The fact is that the domestic has often never been taken as seriously as it should have been, seen more as a female interest, and moreover, texts about the lives of real women (and men) written in a clear narrative voice, often the proviso of women writers, has sometimes been judged as of lower merit.

This tending towards the personal voice found in many women’s non-fiction narratives has often been seen as less universal than the male voice in such texts.  Jo Thompson, editor at Harper Collins has said that women’s non-fiction, though by no means always, often ends up ‘blending expertise with a personal framing’. 

There are many examples of this kind of non-fiction writing from 20^th century women’s writing, including one of the non-fiction greats, Joan Didion, whose journalistic essays often feature the life and times around her, reflective of political and cultural movements – perhaps seen as the ‘important’ subjects - but also have a strong narrative voice, and sometimes include herself and her own experiences as the personal commentator of the times. 

Other prolific female non-fictioneers of the 20^th century include the essayist Susan Sontag, the feminist philosophical works of Simone de Beauvoir, and the feminist investigative journalism of Gloria Steinem, amongst many others.

What is often not taken into account where women’s non-fiction is concerned is the freedom to write which has often been afforded more to male writers than to female.  Well-researched, academic non-fiction books often require travel, requiring access to disposable income and resources for domestic and childcare needs, leaving many female writers, particularly of the past, without the resources to develop their academic research.

A particularly successful sub-genre for non-fiction writing by women in recent years has been within the plethora of contemporary nature memoirs, blending the environment with the personal struggles of the author.  Particularly successful titles include Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, Amy Liptrott’s The Outrun, and Charlotte Runcie’s brilliant Salt on your Tongue, about ‘women, art and the sea’ - which I heartily recommend!

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One such 20^th century female writer who crossed the boundaries between the poetic, natural environment and the academic was Rachel Carson, credited with being one of the first conservationists following the publication of her influential book Silent Spring.  Published in 1962, it has been credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Carson was an American marine biologist, originally working for the US bureau of fisheries, becoming a full-time nature writer in the 1950’s.  Her 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a US National Book Award, and allowed her to work full-time on her writing.  She re-released an earlier book about the sea, Under the Sea Wind and a further The Edge of the Sea, completing a trilogy.

It wasn’t until towards the end of the 1950s that Carson turned her attention towards conservation, expressing her concerns about synthetic pesticides within the world’s oceans.  This resulted in her most famous work Silent Spring in 1962, bringing the attention of environmental concerns to the American public.  Despite being fiercely opposed by chemical companies, her work directly influenced national pesticide policy, resulting in a ban on DDT and other pesticides, as well as spurring a grassroots environmental movement.

‘Underlying all of these problems of introducing contamination into our world is the question of moral responsibility – responsibility not only to our own generation but to those of the future’.

Born on her family’s farm in 1907, Carson spent much of her early life writing stories about animals, having her first story published at the age of 10.  A lover of literature, her favourite novels often included tales of the ocean. 

Originally studying English at college, Carson eventually majored in biology, -though she still enjoyed contributing to the college newspaper - going on to study zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins, earning a Masters in zoology in 1932.  However, due to the family’s financial situation, Carson was forced to leave academia and take up employment with the US Bureau of Fisheries, where she wrote radio copy for a series of weekly educational broadcasts.  Continuing to submit articles around marine biology, Carson eventually secured a professional position with the Bureau as a junior aquatic biologist.

Although Carson never married, she benefited from strong friendships and spending time in her cabin on the coast of Maine. She met Dorothy M Freeman in 1953, with whom she went on to enjoy a friendship for the rest of her life.  Over 12 years, the two women exchanged many letters, published later in Always, Rachel in 1995.  They enjoyed shared interests, including the natural world. Commentators have reported that their friendship consisted of mainly exchanging letters and occasionally holding hands and ‘farewell kissing’.  This led to the speculation of romance between the two women, though Freeman was married, and many of the letters appear guarded, with some reportedly being destroyed. 

‘Never forget, dear one, how deep I have loved you all these years’.

After Carson’s death in 1964, her brother Robert Carson insisted her ashes be scattered with their mother in Maryland, however eventually agreed to split the ashes with Dorothy, who carried out Carson’s wishes to scatter them in Maine. 

Photo of Maine by Mohan Nannapeneni on Pexels

The success of Carson’s book Silent Spring was often credited because of both her scientific knowledge and poetic writing.  Her previous creative writing spirit clearly carried through to her academic studies. 

This leads me to suggest that women’s nonfiction writing has a long history of containing both the personal and the political; the domestic and the academic.  Successful writing in any genre requires a narrative hook, and the important and universal truths that lie therein are all the more poignant when they are written in a way in which we as humans can relate to them. 

Far from this being seen as a negative of women’s non-fiction writing, perhaps it should be seen as an essential part of all successful non-fiction.  If we as readers can connect on a real level with the author of the work in front of us, then it seems clear that we will learn all the better for it.

It has been suggested that the new Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will – as it should – include all genres and forms of non-fiction; from history to memoir, art to science, philosophy to biography, and the ever-popular nature memoir.  Crucially, for writers like Carson and many others, the Prize will allow for recognition of the importance of narrative and personal framing within non-fiction texts.