'POP' FICTION
SIR,—It is perhaps scarcely worth while to refute Miss Mitchison's very bold assertion that 'almost all women,' i.e., almost half the human race, enjoy that peculiar form of journalism; women's magazines. She would, no doubt, regard me and most of my friends as having 'intellectual pretensions considerably in excess of their intellectual attainments'; but it is not my intellectual pretensions which stand, a formidable iron curtain, between me and these magazines (called by most of their readers, I believe, 'books), but a mere ordinary, unpretentious distaste for being bored. I perceive from their covers that they would bore me totally. If I tried to read one in a dentist's waiting- room, my toothache would become acute. Even the older and more dignified among them cannot compete with the bi-sexual Illustrated London News, with its photographs of archeologically exciting places. Who could prefer the sartorial and social scene? Miss Mitchison will retort that I am too old for these maga- zines. But I have always fell the same about them, though when I was young there were, of course, far fewer. And my reading tastes are, I find, quite normal among middle-class professional women of all ages. Miss Mitchison assures that these periodicals contain 'day dreams.' But whose, I wonder? Certainly not mine, at any age; not even in my teens, for then I was all for adventure. Anyhow, one does not read for 'day dreams,' whatever these may be, but for enter- tainment, interest, ideas and style. Should I find any. of these four in these journals? Should I find 'pop fiction intelligent, witty or wise? Would it hold my attention? If I thought so, I would buy and read one. All I can say is that these magazines have an un- commonly forbidding and unappetising appearance, and that my repugnance is shared by very many others.—Yours faithfully,
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