Wenlock

Following on from my earlier post, I was going to use this quote from the Jojo Moyes piece in The Australian:

But being labelled a romantic novelist has its drawbacks. British broadsheet literary editors - including those on The Independent - won't review her books, even though her third, The Peacock Emporium, an inter-generational mystery saga, received blanket coverage in women's magazines.

as the jumping off point for a long and quite possibly rather dry post about the long history of disdain in which popular fiction, and fiction written for and read by women in particular, has been held. Trouble is I can't lay my hands on my copy of John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, which has lots of good stuff vaguely connected to this theme. So I will hold off on that for a while. Instead, I started thinking about tackling the problem of broadsheet literary editors at its heart, and that heart is to be found, I reckon, at Literary Festivals.

No, I am not about to suggest that writers of popular fiction chain themselves to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, or throw themselves under the 2005 Festival of Words in Derby, but, in the immortal words of Charlie Croker, I've got a great idea.

More tomorrow when I've thought it through a bit.