`POP' FICTION
SIR,-1 was very interested in your article on 'pop' fiction by Vittor Anant in your issue of the Spectator
• on February 14.
That the love stories we do give are acceptable to large numbers of women, many of whom—as you must know—live humdrum lives, is proved by the fact that in ten years the weekly circulation of Woman's Own has grown from some 600,000 to some 2,600,000, and is read—according to the Hulton Readership Survey—by actually seven million women. That the heroes of these stories do indeed deal in the main with 'creative commercial jobs such as advertising, designing, modelling, public relations, ;iv production,' etc., is, we think, ,a true reflection of the aspirations of millions of young women of today. Even the Spectator must know that, in the eyes of a great number of women; misguided per- haps, a film -star or a TV producer is still a more interesting figure than a bank clerk or an insurance agent.
1 am quite sure that the Spectator in its own way knows its own function in catering for its readers, as Woman's Own• in its larger way obviously does also. It is possible to wonder which is closer to real life.
I write this to you as the Managing Editor of Woman's Own, a magazine staffed by a group of extremely intelligent men and women—among whom arc three ex-editors of the his. My own life has not been entirely devoted to women's magazines, much as I believe in them. I was editor of a national newspaper for twenty years, dealing' so much with realities and having such profound personal political convictions that my newspaper and staff were on Hitler's famous Black List. I mention this merely to remove any misapprehension that women's maga- zines are directed by people who live in ivory towers.
I wonder if you are aware what a revolution in publishing has been taking place in the last ten years, thanks largely to the fact that nearly every woman in this country today is earning money, either part- time or whole-time.
Many of them, besides coping with a job, have husband, home and children to look after, and they are obviously not spending this hard-earned money on magazines in which they, do not believe. It is very easy to make fun of the hopes and likes of ordinary people. If your contributor had read Woman's Own with any degree of perception or had wanted to give a true picture he would have seen that in the issues he 'analysed' there were such writers as William Saroyan, Elizabeth Taylor, Ann Bridge, Penelope Mortimer, Gillian Freeman and Monica Stirling.
And if he had gone into a few issues further back he would have discovered the following con- tributors : Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, A. J. Cronin, Daphne du Maurier, Nigel Balchin, Vicki Baum, Monica Dickens, Beverley Nichols, H. E. Bates, Germaine Beaumont, Eric Linklater, Pearl Buck and Alec Waugh.—Yours faithfully, Tower House, Southampton Street, Strand, WC2
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