The Barometer of Literary Taste: Gender and Book Reviews

This chapter scrutinises the influence of book reviews, book reviewers and literary editors on the reputations of authors, through an analysis of the reviews in Australian Book Review, The Age and The Australian from 1965 to 2015. This chapter builds upon the work of Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond (Australian Humanities Review 60:84–107, 2016), Stella Count and the VIDA Count, as well as activist research by the Women in Publishing collective (Cooter et al. in Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1987) and Dale Spender (1987) that revealed a gender gap in the space given to women’s writing among the major reviewing publications. The results of this analysis illuminate entrenched reviewing practices, especially where male reviewers are concerned, that contribute to the continued existence of this gap. But it is not only reviewing practice that ensures this gap between men and women persists, but also editorial practices, the constant threat to the number of pages dedicated to book reviewing in the newspapers and the broader perceptions around women, writing, literary value and authority.