He’s a surprising candidate for such a title, considering he was once known exclusively for his insights into maleness. His most well-known novels—"Fever Pitch" and "High Fidelity"—zeroed in on male arrested development; their grown male protagonists were still obsessed with childhood hobbies (football and pop music), and unable to maintain a successful relationship. We should probably include "About a Boy" on this list, as well, even if unemployment and casual sex don’t quite qualify as hobbies. But a shift in Hornby’s thinking must have occurred at some point. He has subsequently written three novels about women, including his most recent offering, "Funny Girl," which follows a young female comic as she tries to break into the male-dominated world of British television comedy in the 1960s.



Hornby’s scripts, character-driven as they may be, come with a distinctly feminist flavor. "An Education," the story of a teenage girl (Carey Mulligan) who falls for a con man (Peter Sarsgaard) in the early 1960s, is at its core about a clever young woman struggling to wrest control of her own future away from the men in her life; the most poignant conflict in the film is between the girl and her father (Alfred Molina), who pushes her to go to Oxford but only for the sole purpose of meeting a man. He gives up on Oxford when he meets her charming older beau—what does a girl need school for if she’s got a husband?—so her decision to ultimately attend university anyway feels emblematic of that era’s feminist victories. But the film is never defined by these politics; instead, Hornby feels his ways into the story and resists the urge to turn his heroine into a symbol, an icon, or anything less than a human being.

The same goes for "Brooklyn," the critically-acclaimed immigrant fable now in theaters. On paper, the story of Eilis, a young Irish woman trying to build a life in New York in the ‘50s, could be read as a feminist text; after all, this was an era when women were reared to be housewives, and our Eilis has plans to be both an accountant and a wife. The love triangle that emerges, however, between her and her two suitors largely dismisses her professional aspirations—although it is subtly implied that one of her potential husbands will be more supportive of her career than the other. As such, it’s easy to imagine the film being criticized for celebrating a young woman who values a husband over a career, especially in our era of identity politics. No such criticism has been voiced, however, and here’s why: the character is so sharply written—she is so undeniably real—that Hornby never gives us the empty space to view her as a political object.