Novel life for singles

This broad study tracks women's popular fiction in the second half of the 20th century alongside the ups and downs of modern feminism. If the blockbuster Peyton Place was one of the first novels for women that turned the private into the political, what do the ironic references in chick-lit say about a contemporary feminist position? Writing about popular fiction is often not included in the "canon" of feminist criticism. More often, the canon has been downright suspicious of market success.

Imelda Whelehan argues that looking through the market's eyes enables her to take the debate around second-wave feminism further.

Referring to Elaine Showalter, she says that most feminist criticism, indeed feminist "literature", was read only by the few; the theoretical feminist debate for most women was played out through the filter of popular fiction. Fittingly, this student-friendly book is clear and easy to read.

Whelehan focuses on key themes. Throughout this period, several books fixed on the idea of the single girl or "singleton". She illustrates some of the ambivalence towards this found in Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (was this really a guide to a successful single life or a marriage manual?), Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (whose heroine is sexually experimental but never really satisfied), and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (where the heroine is continually in search of "The One").

Tensions around heterosexual sex, produced by radical feminist politics, are played out in popular novels about women trapped in domestic spaces and in consciousness-raising narratives (Betty Friedan, Marilyn French and Marge Piercy). Whelehan argues that Lisa Alther, for example, both sympathises with and sends up radical feminist practices. Readers took some ideas on board, but many may not have examined their vaginas with a speculum or taken up celibacy or lesbianism.

It is when Whelehan reaches the contemporary period that she enters territory that until now has been covered mostly by journalism or cultural studies. She is perhaps rather predictably at odds with the bonkbusters of the 1980s, but she makes an interesting link between conservative, if ironic, chick-lit forms and feminist backlash criticism (Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe). Though Whelehan is sceptical of "power feminism" as espoused by these later theorists, she elides their distaste of the second wave's "victim feminism" with that of the chick-lit heroine's refusal to call herself feminist at all. Read alongside texts such as Th ird Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (edited by Stacy Gillis et al), The Feminist Bestseller provides a thought-provoking commentary on how young women respond to their history and the types of representation of themselves they choose.

Antonia Byatt is director of the Women's Library, London Metropolitan University.