Williams writes women

It was purely an accident, caused by the order I chose to read the novels of Charles Williams, that I got the idea that complex, abstract sentences were associated with female characters. (It was the start of Chapter IX of The Greater Trumps, which clocked in at grade level 13, followed by the first two chapters of The Place of the Lion.) I decided to test that idea, including the books I hadn’t read yet. To decide whether a chapter was about women or men, I counted the number of times “she” appeared. Nominative case, so she’s doing things instead of having things done to her. Then I divided that count by the total number of times “he” and “she” appeared, so I get a number between 0 and 1. It turns out that William’s novels have no chapters with 35% to 40% on this measure, so I set 40% as the breakpoint between chapters about women and chapters about men. It could have been 50%; the difference is only 6 chapters out of 104. Figure 1 shows one complexity metric, the proportion of abstract (as opposed to concrete) words ¹ in each chapter, tagged by whether the chapter is about women or men.

Fig. 1. The proportion of abstract words per chapter for each book, marked by prevalence of women.

Well, that hypothesis went nowhere. I checked lots of other metrics, and they showed a similar lack of pattern. At the chapter level, women and men get the same kind of prose. But I did see something unexpected. The books are sorted by date of writing, and there are no chapters about women in the first two books. Figure 2 adds the comparison novels I used last time. This is a box-and-whisker plot: the heavy line inside the box is the average over all chapters in the book. The box is drawn to include the middle 50% of the chapters, and the whiskers stick out to cover most of the rest. If there’s a weird outlier, it’s shown as a dot far away from the box.²

Fig. 2. the variation of gender prevalence in the sample books

To nobody’s surprise, Captain Blood is almost womanless. In fact, some of those “she”s are boats. Williams’s first published novel, War in Heaven, is even worse. At the other end, similarly unsurprising, Miss Marple’s story of The Murder at the Vicarage has women doing lots of things. Some of those chapters are 7/8 women. Leslie Charteris comes off unexpectedly well — that’s a lot of female agency for a story aimed at men in 1928. Williams shows a steady progression towards more female activity as time goes on. He starts out with a couple of Boy’s Own stories, but by the end of his life, he was matching Agatha Christie and surpassing her on average. All Hallows’ Eve only has three male-dominated chapters.

So what does this mean? I don’t know. It’s just rare to find such a definite trend when I’m quantifying literature, so I figured I’d mention it.

1. Brysbaert, Marc, et al. “Concreteness Ratings for 40 Thousand Generally Known English Word Lemmas.” Behavior Research Methods, vol. 46, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 904–11. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5.
2. If you’ve ever wondered what an “outlier” was lying outside of, this is it.