I recently realized, to my great embarrassment, that all of my favorite writers were men. What's more is all of my favorite books are by men. Some of them were of course gay, but I doubt that that should make any difference in terms of gender--although curiously a character in Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince," Francis Marlowe, suspects all writers of being homosexual.
Along with Jane Austen, Iris Murdoch is one of those writers that I will probably soon revisit. "The Black Prince" struck as a fairly excellent dramatic novel, situated, in modern terms, equidistantly from Martin Amis' "The Information" and Nabokov's "Lolita." It features the academic and literary envy that is the theme of the former and the forbidden romance of the latter, although handled very differently, along with the question of the unreliable narrator.
