“Most great novelists have been brilliant at comedy as well as tragedy. And this is no less true of Jane Austen and George Eliot than it is of Tolstoy and Dickens. Recently, however, there does seem to have been a movement away from comedy in fiction, a growing feeling that, in order to be ‘serious’, novels have to be dark in tone. And, arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women’s fiction between frothy, commercial ‘chicklit’ and more serious, ‘literary’ work.”