Crikey, girls' reading habits are awfully confusing, aren't they? ... Boris Johnson. Photograph: Martin Argles
"At this late stage in my life I've decided I need to understand the female mind more. Having never read it, I'd never understood why is it that girls like Middlemarch so much, but love it they do. And now I'm determined to find out why.
"Why do girls love these big, epically long, boring books? Anyway, I've set myself to my purpose and I am currently flagellating myself through it. I've done 150 pages so far. I'm just waiting for it to hot up." Thus opines Boris Johnson, in this month's Easy Living magazine.
Hmm. So why do we girls (or, as we might prefer to style ourselves if we are in fact old enough to read Middlemarch, women) love these big, epically long, boring books? Perhaps because where men like Boris see vast acres of impedimenta to plot and purpose, we see nuanced description, the subtle and elegant construction of character, the careful dissection of social niceties and moral ambiguities, all of which seems at least as satisfying and as worthwhile a reward for reading as does simply jumping from plot point to plot point like Wodehouse's chamois with his crags.
Big, bountiful Victorian novels are all going to appear - to anyone whose primary interests are Latin, Greek and politics - as giant, sprawling, unwieldy messes with too much "extraneous" detail to fit them either for relaxation or adding in an efficient manner to the sum of human knowledge. They require the kind of mind that is used to detail and to dealing with sprawling, messy businesses like real life and real relationships and which likes to see something of their infinite complexities reflected in the book it reads.
Women's lives are detail and they naturally gravitate towards books that contain it - be it Middlemarch, Aga sagas or 300-page Maeve Binchys. They are neither fazed by nor dismissive of it. They know that the meaning of life resides there as much as in grand themes worked out with cold reason, ruthless economy and cardboard characters.
As for why women love Middlemarch in particular - well, it may have something to do with the fact that Dorothea's various struggles to break through the boundaries of her heavily circumscribed life have historically resonated with women of subsequent generations equally trapped by social and cultural expectations and prohibitions. Or it may have something to do with the fact that she is a rare example of female nobility in literature, a quality traditionally and, especially for an author, more easily ascribed to men.
And of course, the book is also a valuable and timeless warning for women against marrying any man whose soul can be described by a neighbour as "a great bladder for dried peas to rattle in".
The greater question arising, of course, is what can women read to understand the mind of Boris Johnson? The Beano glossed by Herodotus? Herodotus glossed by the Beano? The Bullingdon Club charter? The Have I Got News for You autocue? Flashman and the Feigned Apology to Scousers?
Suggestions welcome, as epically long as you like.
