Penguin Classics

I convinced my wife of the virtue of Jane Austen novels; she convinced me to read D.H. Lawrence.

You could argue that this shows that what you read and what your gender is don't have anything to do with each other. Austen may write about women in drawing rooms chatting about love, and Lawrence may be a modernist obsessed with manly power, passion, and coal miners. But nonetheless, men can love Jane Austen (and pass that love to their wives) and women can love D.H. Lawrence (and pass that love to their husbands) because gendered bodies don't determine aesthetic interests. As commenter Aaron Thorpe wrote in response to a piece I wrote last week, "I have never met anyone—ANYONE—who considers the author's gender when deciding whether or not to read a book."

Thorpe was criticizing my argument that men, in particular, can enjoy and learn from the writing of women like Jane Austen. That article said that the gender, of readers and writers, can affect how we appreciate and respond to literature—though not always in straightforward or intuitive ways.

One person who I think might agree with me is none other than Lawrence himself. Few writers have been as obsessed with the primacy and determinative power of gender and bodies and sex. In his 1922 short story "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," a small-town doctor—whose job it is to resist and contain nature in the form of disease—rescues the titular horse-dealer's daughter from drowning and falls in love with a violent, rapturous power: "his heart seemed to burn and melt away in his breast. " Moreover, he experiences that violence and that power as an assault on his intellect and his profession. As Lawrence puts it, "this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honour." The "personal element" here is, precisely, sex and bodies, and the gender that connects the two. You may hide in professionalism or honor or aesthetics, Lawrence says, but still gender will find you.