Holly Wainwright

These books have been unqualified successes, all written by women,

all hugely successful.

But they have, Yesteryear and Strangers in particular, attracted an enormous amount of criticism too.

The author of Yesteryear, who has made a lovely amount of money from selling the rights to this book, and it's sold the film rights to Anne Hathaway and all those things, has just wrapped up her promotional tour.

So the more successful your book is, the longer that tour will go.

If it keeps selling in different places,

markets and territories, you're going to be like, oh, can you now go to blah, blah, keep talking about it to such and such.

So she's had a long promotional tour for this book, but it's over.

And she wrote a notes app.

Notes app's very popular this week about it.

I'm just going to read a couple of the things she has to say about the reaction that she's had.

I find it genuinely interesting, writes Cara Claire Burke, that men can and do create art and analyze culture in such a fashion that drives fervent conversation and debate and disagreement without the art or analysis in question being so frequently relegated to a term, and she means rage bait by that term, that literally means designed to piss someone off.

The term rage bait has been used to describe three wildly different books, the ones we just discussed,

And the only real connection between them is that one, they feature imperfect women, two, they don't offer a clean moral ending, and three, they've been commercially successful.

When male artists pull this hat trick off, it's considered an intellectual achievement.

When women do it, it's more often characterized as an accident, a mass orchestration, or a cheap parlor trick.

She says that all these things have been qualified as rage bait designed to piss people off when they're just women's stories.

Now, as she says, these books are all really different.

Hers is a novel that was always going to be viewed as political because of its topic.

Lena Dunham's, I would argue, has been massively well-received actually, but it is the POV, I think I'm using that correctly, of a once very polarizing figure.