Short shrift

Chattering, by Louise Stern, Granta, RRP£10.99, 170 pages

Are They Funny, Are They Dead?, by Marjorie Ann Watts, CB Editions, RRP£7.99, 192 pages

Delicate Edible Birds, by Lauren Groff, Windmill Books, RRP£7.99, 320 pages

Travelling Light, by Tove Jansson, Sort Of Books, RRP£7.99, 208 pages

Can it be argued that the short story form is peculiarly suited to women? Last year’s all-women shortlist for the National Short Story prize tempted a few to try. The short story suits busy mothers with little writing time, it’s often said (although that doesn’t explain Elizabeth Gaskell’s very long books and very many children). It’s a form that suits the depiction of relationships, a favourite concern of women writers, was another argument. But novels do that job just as well.

The urge to prove a vital connection between women and the short story is surely, therefore, an irrational one. But it is also compelling, given the number of women who excel at the art: Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Claire Keegan, Ruth Thomas and Helen Simpson all follow in the footsteps of the great Katherine Mansfield, and almost all write exclusively short stories. Why do so many women writers choose to privilege the art of the short story above other literary forms?

Perhaps it’s relevant that the first short storyteller was a woman. Scheherazade told a different tale every night for a thousand and one nights in order to delay her execution. Angela Carter wrote of the “European convention of an archetypal female storyteller”, Mother Goose, the one who “invented all the old wives’ tales”. In The Secret Self, two volumes of short stories written by women, Hermione Lee spoke of tales in the collection that were “political”, not as “statements” but as stories, full of the negotiation between “the private and the particular, and the external and the universal”.

This notion of the short story as “political” for women bears further examination. Scheherazade spoke at a time when women were not meant to speak. Speaking was a political act, and no one would give a woman’s voice the time it needed to tell a novel. But to save her own life, Scheherazade had to tell a story. She just had to do it fast. Is it too fanciful to wonder if something of that urgency, that primal need to keep it short because we fear we only have a small burst of time to speak and be listened to, lies behind the popularity of this form for generations of women ever since?

In Chattering, Louise Stern’s debut short story collection, the importance of a woman’s voice is primary because Stern herself is deaf and so are most of her protagonists. In “Roadrunner”, a hitchhiking deaf girl thinks of the “small, fierce encampment” of deaf people in a world of the hearing, with “their mouths opening and closing endlessly”. Yet she longs, too, for the subtleties of language that she cannot hear. In “The Velvet Rope”, three deaf friends have a night on the town and end up at a party where men lie around drunk and watch porn. Two of them go looking for their third friend, and spot a naked woman emerging from a bedroom. They didn’t even know she was there. “More silent women,” says the narrator. How to be heard when you cannot speak; how to speak when you cannot hear other women’s voices, replays through Stern’s stories.

The ghost of Scheherazade flits through Marjorie Ann Watts’ collection too, as her elderly characters try to ward off death in Are They Funny, Are They Dead? Watts favours the “epiphany” school of short story writing, which depends on a moment of revelation, but this can make her slightly leftfield stories a little predictable. The feistiness of her heroines, though, who won’t be put off, like the female patient in “A Vivid Imagination”, or little Linny, who defies God in “Religious Studies”, would surely have pleased the late Angela Carter.

If a woman speaking is a political, life-saving act, and not the shrewish, gossipy activity Carter suggests centuries of patriarchy has viewed it as, then Lauren Groff’s deliciously acute and sometimes disturbing tales in Delicate Edible Birds, straight from Lorrie Moore country, are shot through with politics. In “Majorette”, a little girl doesn’t speak after being assaulted by classmates, but one day when she’s older she meets a young man who says: “You can have all the opinions you want around me. Go ahead and practise.” In my favourite tale, “Blythe”, a woman never tells her friend what a life-sucking parody she is and suffers the consequences. “Blythe spoke and though I couldn’t hear the words, I heard the hunger in them.” All she can do is turn away, as though hungry Blythe has even stolen her voice.

Tove Jansson understood, too, this dangerous power of women speaking, and in both “The Woman who Borrowed Memories” and “The Garden of Eden”, two superlative stories from her collection, Travelling Light, she pinpoints what society fears from women’s voices. Wanda’s power over Stella is a spoken one, as she contradicts every one of Stella’s memories. Josephine and “X” manage to make an entire village operate around their antagonism to each other. Not everything that women say is good or kind; not everything they say is useful or important. But getting to say it, and not be denigrated or sidelined as a woman simply for saying it, marks out the difference, historically, between men and women writers. It explains women’s rush to speak, before someone more powerful silences them.

Lesley McDowell is the author of ‘Between the Sheets: The Famous Literary Liaisons of Nine Twentieth-Century Women Writers’ (Duckworth)