After watching both the television production of Pride and Prejudice and the movie Sense and Sensibility, a friend of mine, in the midst of selecting novels for his course on contemporary fiction, remarked that, however distant late-eighteenth-century notions of decorum may be from the remnants of manners in the late twentieth century, Jane Austen's material was essentially the same as Terry McMillan's in Waiting to Exhale. They both were concerned with how to secure an acceptable male. McMillan's Robin, Bernadine, Gloria, and Savannah may have criteria different from those of Austen's Elizabeth and Jane Bennett or Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, but all these characters are struggling to give reason at least some say over their libidos, which seem invariably to lead them astray.

My friend shook his head, remembering how his own daughters dismissed the prospective suitors he enthusiastically promoted—and unwittingly damned—by describing them as "nice boys." Nice boys, his daughters made it clear, are boring. What accounted for this self-destructive streak in women? he wanted to know. Did Calvin or Freud have the right explanation? Was it biology or sheer perversity that led women to prefer men like Willoughby and Russell?

Not wanting to provide my friend with more ammunition, I didn't bring up the spate of self-help books like Dr. Laura's Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, all of which involve the decade's most nebulous noun—relationships. Instead, I attempted to steer the conversation toward the socioeconomic differences between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Wasn't there something poignant in the circumstances of the Dashwood girls, I asked, cast out of their childhood home and forced to market themselves to likely bachelors in order to save the other sisters and the widowed mother? Certainly, he agreed, but that merely fueled his vexation. After all, McMillan's protagonists are economically self-sufficient, upper-middle-class professionals. Likewise with Roz, Charis, and Tony, Margaret Atwood's threesome in The Robber Bride. So why, he rephrased the question, can't women, now that they're no longer dependent on men for economic survival, write about something besides getting a man— the just-right man?

Men write novels about "relationships" too, of course. Look at Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, much of Dickens, and even Henry James. But they also write about a whole universe of other topics, from Mississippi riverboats to murdering the landlady. They write epics on war, race, and politics. They find occupations fascinating and make even unlikely industries like whaling and meatpacking interesting. Can't women focus on any material other than their need of men?

Certainly women write as well as men and often better. No one is so deft at nailing down metaphysical nuances as Muriel Spark nor more stylistically daring than Toni Morrison. Skill is not in question here, only subject matter.

Nor do I discount the significance of their almost single subject. The attractions that pull men and women together and the aversions that push them apart account for a major and essential portion of life, one that needs exploring from the point of view of half the world's population. Barred from much of the world's business until recent decades, women have simply followed the dictum to write about what they know best—romance, marriage, sex, families, and cooking.

Of course, until relatively recently women didn't write—or at least publish—much of anything. Yes, there are the surviving lyrics of Sappho. A few medieval mystics. A handful of poems from the Renaissance, and Elizabeth I's translation of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. Marie de La Fayette wrote five novels about the romantic intrigues of the seventeenth-century French court of Henri II. But that's about it for fiction. Pretty slim pickings until the eve of the nineteenth century, when Fanny Burney burst upon the scene with Evelina, Cecillia, and Camilla, followed soon by Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.

Almost two centuries later, women novelists are still locked into the same subject matter—romantic love. It often comes with a thick veneer of irony these days, but nevertheless, most women's fictional output appears to be little more than footnotes to Seinfeld. Are there no alternatives? Are "relationships" the only topic we find interesting? Is there no other repository where writing women can invest their passion?

Well, yes. Nature and God. Flannery O'Connor's stories and novels are about as unromantic a look at life as one could ask for. The few sexual situations in which her grotesque characters find themselves only serve to illustrate their pitiful penchant for self-delusion—Manley Pointer stealing Hulga's wooden leg, Tarwater's rape by the lavender-eyed devil. The only ecstasy ever depicted by O'Connor is spiritual—Ruby Turpin's culminating vision of heaven in "Revelation" being my favorite.

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, takes both the natural world and God for its subject. None of her ensuing narratives concern themselves with women pining for men, or vice versa. Instead, they talk about trips to the North Pole, airplane acrobatics, moths, Ecuadorian deer, Chinese politicians. Even The Living, which purports to be a novel, treats the several marriages that occur within its pages primarily as historical artifacts. Not too many decades ago, Dillard would have been described as having a "masculine mind" because of her wide-ranging interests.

Curiously, women writers have also excelled since World War I at writing murder mysteries. Ever since Agatha Christie's name became synonymous with the genre, women have come near to dominating the field. Dorothy Sayers bumped up the intellectual content a notch with her Lord Peter Wimsey series. Ruth Rendell and P. D. James now reign as the current aristocracy of British detective fiction. In this country, Patricia Cornwell (Ruth Bell Graham's biographer) specializes in serial killers. Though lust sometimes provides the motivation in mysteries by women, the crime is just as likely to be precipitated by avarice, envy, or pride.

But such works are, for the most part, dismissed as genre fiction by the literary establishment. And when I used Dillard and O'Connor as examples to refute my friend's argument, he discounted them as anomalies. His point still holds true for most fiction written by women, he claimed. And I had to admit, if only silently, that I was hard-pressed to prove otherwise.

But my friend is nothing if not fair-minded, and he continued to ruminate. "On the other hand," he asked, "what do men today really write about? Okay, so women fixate on acquiring an adequate man, but men write about becoming an adequate man. First you get their bildungsromans, the coming-of-age novels—everything from Larry Watson to Cormac McCarthy to Mark Helprin. Then you get the midlife crisis stories—Updike and Roth and Bellow and Carver."

He threw up his hands. "So I guess you could say what men write about is—themselves."

I had to admit that, looked at this way, women's fiction didn't seem so limited after all. For all I know, the answer to how we—men and women—choose our fictional subjects lies in the third chapter of Genesis. Maybe it will always be the rare woman who writes a novel about whales or warfare. Perhaps as a tribe women are indeed driven more by the search for the ultimately adequate man than by the sweaty-browed struggle against thorns and thistles. I don't know if C. S. Lewis ever actually said the line given to him in the movie version of Shadowlands: "We read to know we're not alone." But if fiction is supposed to lift us from the confines of our isolation, women writers continue to pass on a variant of that aphorism, Eve's version learned back in Eden: it takes two to tango.

Virginia Stem Owens, a member of the editorial board of Books & Culture and a novelist, essayist, and poet, is the director of the Milton Center at Kansas Newman College.

Books & Culture Nov/Dec 1997 p. 3-4