Write Like a Boy

Despite the fact that I have an enormous amount of work, and am indeed getting all that work done, if anybody asks, I occasionally find little bits of time here and there -- as for instance last night, when it was 5:30 or so and I was done with my VERY busy day -- during all of which I had indeed been working, as mentioned above -- and was waiting for Michelle to come pick me up so we could go to see the Globe Theatre's production of Twelfth Night (which turned out to be one of those events which make being alive absolutely worth it), and since I had that little bit of time on my hands, I thought I'd go on over to The Literature Network and check out the literary gender of an author or two.

My results: Jane Austen writes like a boy (first chunk of Emma). Faulkner writes like a boy. Flannery O'Connor writes like a girl, which I found startling till I remembered all those Southern women I know who SOUND really sweet, but then later you discover that you're bleeding all over the floor and have lost a rhetorical battle you didn't know you were in.

Dylan Thomas writes like a boy. Abelard writes like a boy, but so does Heloise. Christine de Pizan, on the other hand, writes like a girl. So does Chaucer.

Startlingly, Yeats writes like a boy, but Brendan Behan writes like a girl. Louisa May Alcott writes like a girl, and so does Jonathan Swift. So does Virginia Woolf, which I think would have pissed her off.

But Frances Hodgson Burnett writes like a girl, which I think she was trying for.

Dickens? Boy.

Lewis Carroll? Girl. (He'd have liked that.)

James Joyce writes like a girl for the 2nd chapter of Portrait of the Artist, at least (not the first -- I figured the moo-cow might mess things up), but for Ulysses he writes like a boy. I used the Buck Mulligan beginning.

My favorite of all: Oscar Wilde writes like a boy. You go, Oscar!

I'm going to stop now. I'm not sure what the Gender Genie tells us, but I figure it's Not Much.