“It may sound ridiculous, but judging by the clichéd offerings in the bookshops at the moment, much of the great romantic writing by women would never have seen the light of day if it had been submitted to today’s publishers. Manderley would have sustained minor fire damage. Rochester’s blindness would become acute hay fever. Cathy and Heathcliff would have had near-death experiences, survived, married. You get the picture. Now I’m not knocking the writers who succeed in either the chick-lit or the mummy-lit genres. However much we enjoy these books, and I do, they provide a pretty limited literary diet. Why should we be forced to endure a long summer on a selection of novels where tragedy is a sick nanny and failure is a lacklustre dinner party?”