SOURCE: “Don't Allow the Clitterati to Make You Feel Inadequate,” in New Statesman, Vol. 129, No. 4485, May 8, 2000, p. 24.

In the following essay, Odone discusses how Binchy deals with male and female sexuality in her writing.

The news that Maeve Binchy, Britain's most popular female novelist, is to hang up her pen, has plunged me into despair. Binchy was no Tolstoy, but she served a key social role. She fought the conspiracy to make us, the female readers, feel hopelessly inadequate.

Read trendy young scribblers such as Elizabeth Wurtzel, who has just published a guide to contemporary sexual mores called The Bitch Rules, and you'll see that they trade on making women feel dated. Their premise is that, if we want to get on in the new society, we must take up new attitudes towards sex. Forget the old feminist stuff about sex being a plot perpetrated on unsuspecting women...