Think Pink! Chick Lit’s Favourite Colour Examined

As every little girl knows, pink is her colour. The modern mother who reads Demond Morris’s Babywatching and discovers that the blue of baby boys’ clothes symbolises heavenly good fortune whereas the pink of girls merely represents flesh may reject it, but it remains obstinately there as the Essence of Feminity. Nowhere is this more evident than in bookshops. Walk into any Waterstones, Books Etc. or Ottakars and what do you see? Row upon row of chick-lit books, glowing pinkly in shades from icing-sugar to raspberry. From Jane Green to Sophie Kinsella, from Isabel Wolff to Adele Parks, if you’re a woman reader in search of an entertaining read, you can have any colour as long as it’s pink.

Yet now, it seems, the decade-long dominance of pink may be about to change. Next month, Allison Pearson’s international best-seller, I Don’t Know How She Does It is being re-jacketed in a sober navy blue. India Knight’s new book, The Shops, has its pink shrunk to a mere ribbon. Janet Evanovitch’s delightfully dizzy bounty-hunter, Stephanie Plum appears in To the Nines all in day-glo green and purple, without a trace of her trademark pink. Wendy Holden, after a brief flirtation with pink in the lettering of Simply Divine, has stuck to twirling greens and purples. Following The Llama Parlour, Kathy Lette turned acid yellow, then mauve. Even Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, which sported bubblegum pink for its first volume, has now changed to cooler blues and greens. Has pink had its day?

India Knight denies the overall brown effect of The Shops is due to a sea-change in fashion. “My original very pink jacket for My Life on A Plate was fabulous, I think, and was much-copied. The only reason why my pink has shrunk is that The Shops is non-fiction, and is meant to look like a brown paper parcel tied with a pink ribbon.” Having said that, she thinks that her next novel might be given a different colour, “since every book designer now sticks women’s books inside pink. The problem is that pink is immediately friendly and sexy-looking, whereas blue is butch, green bilious and red too Edwina Currie.”

The more sophisticated, literary end of the women’s fiction market has in fact been playing with alternatives to pink for a good couple of years. Helen Simpson’s outstanding collection of short stories about modern motherhood, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, has three of the words in its title in pink, but the remaining three in blue and green. Sabine Durrant’s second novel, The Great Indoors, concerning the late-blooming emotional life of an interior decorator, brilliantly uses a Cath Kidston fabric design. Its roses are a vivid pink, but set against an equally intense blue make it look witty and stylish. Her first, the best-selling Having It and Eating It, featured only a single stripe of pink in among violet, green and red.
“I wanted to have green, but my publisher (Time Warner) told me that I couldn’t because green doesn’t sell,” she says. Like Helen Simpson, her fiction, dubbed “hen-lit”, is concerned with older women and mothers who may feel pink is more appropriate for their baby daughters than themselves.

A former publisher turned author, Robyn Sisman observes dryly that “pink jackets are inadvisable if aiming at the Booker shortlist, but otherwise a harmless indicatior of an entertaining read – if the writer is female. In the case of a male author, pink indicates pornography and is probably OK for Booker status.” Her own romantic comedies, such as the best-selling Just Friends, use pink in such tongue-in-cheek images as flying pigs, but are several cuts above the kind of extended magazine-article romp by Jane Green or Sophie Kinsella. Like Nancy Mitford and Wendy Holden, Sisman’s brand of romantic fiction keeps its pink well under control, with her new novel, Week-end in Paris, having its heroine dressed in rose but gazing out at a blue Parisian sky.

It is widely agreed among writers of romantic fiction that the precise shade of pink is all-important. “I think pink, being my favourite colour, is divinely lovely, but there is a problem with it on a book-cover because unless you get exactly the right shade it can look horribly cutesy – it’s the difference between Schiaparelli and Barbara Cartland,” says India Knight. Kate Saunders, author of The Marrying Game agrees.

“Nobody has ever put pink on me, but if it sold my books I’d have one the colour of poo. That said, I do think that chick-lit is just Mills & Boon under another name, so I don’t know why they’re trying to ring the changes in a sub-genre that has always featured a cartoon of a champagne bottle and a poodle somewhere on the cover. The lower end of the market gets a sickly pink and publishers signal that they’ve upped the ante by making the pink more shocking. It’s all a cliché, but people shouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

Certainly the rise of fiction by and about British Asians has made the more vibrant shades of this controversial colour look a lot more daring. “Pink,” as Diana Vreeland famously observed, “is the navy-blue of India,” and lacks the Barbiesque symbolism it carries here. Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused, Meera Syal’s Anita and Me and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane all feature the startling shades of red-pink familiar from Indian fabrics and Bollywood posters. Far from putting readers off, they advertise the fact that the contents will transport the reader far from the realms of sickly romance into the moral and social complexities Jane Austen would have recognised. Syal’s, which was shortlisted for the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize, is almost unbearable to look at in exploiting a colour clash between its pink background and a girl in a canary-yellow dress, a reflection of its savagely funny and biting take on life in multi-racial Britain.

“I don’t think that the boiled sweet style has had its day, “ says Marianne Velmans, publisher of Doubleday UK. “It has a legitimate commercial appeal, but like all genres once someone has had a success with a certain look, everyone else jumps on the bandwagon and that prompts the inevitable back-lash.” Aware of this, Doubleday are now publishing novels in which pink is used ironically, as in Gigi Levangie’s Maneater, featuring hot pink and zebra stripes – with a bite-mark taken out of the cover. They have also exploited the colour for a “very worthy pink collection of short stories by leading women writers, “A Day in the Life”, for Breast Cancer Care.

Allison Pearson herself denies turning her back on the colour for the reissue of I Don’t Know How She Does It. “I must admit I was worried about having a pink cover at first. I thought it would shout trivial and lightweight. Now I think the most important thing is for the book to look desirable, something you really want to pick up. The reason for the change in the US and here is that we have had several very positive reactions from male readers, particularly baffled husbands of working mothers. However, a few confessed to being anxious about being seen holding something so girly-looking on the Tube. Hence the decision to print a blue “boys’ version”. But I LOVE my pink jackets – as Kay Thompson says in Funny Face, “Think Pink!” They’ve sold 320,000 in hardback in the US and 250 in paperback here, so the last thing I want to do is spearhead an anti-pink movement.”

Pink book-jackets also get a thumbs-up from Alice Rawsthorne, Director of London’s Design Museum and probably the hippest woman in England.

“With the honourable exception of Penguin in the 1940s, book publishing isn’t the best role model for design,” she says. “They tend to follow trends not lead them. In the 1960s the groovy young designers tended to do record covers; now they do web-sites. The dominant trend now is a return to romanticism. As a culture, we’re at ease with all colours, and can embrace pink whereas before we were too embarrassed. There are no taboos any longer. Pink used to be a sleazy, girly, Diana Dors colour, emblematic of pink Cadillacs and Las Vegas neon signs, but its been made respectable. The flesh-pink carpets of Prada have been an icon of modern chic since the 1990s, and the pink cladding of the Laban dance centre in Deptford by leading architects Herzog and de Meuran mean it’s seen as THE cutting edge colour. Pearson’s novel is emblematic of intelligent chick-lit, and its pink shows the influence of post-feminism, and the confidence women feel. If publishers are abandoning it now, it just shows how conservative and out-of-touch they are.”

The truth is that all colours have different shades of symbolism and significance, and pink is no worse a colour than any other. Personally, I have always hated pink for exactly the same reason that Maria, the heroine of Elizabeth Goudge’s classic children’s novel, The Little White Horse did. Like her, I have red hair – and red with pink clashes horribly. Yes as Maria discovers, all colours come from God, and as such should be welcomed and celebrated. Yes, it is the colour of nasty sweets, plastic dolls, processed pork and synthetic feminity. Yet it is also the colour of flamingos, of Indian weddings, of roses, lilies, daisies and dianthus. It is the colour that the Nazis made gay men wear as a badge of shame, which Gay Pride redeemed as a badge of courage. It is the colour of the dawn, and the sunset; and it is the colour my little girl loved the best and wore the most - before she grew sophisticated, and turned to black.

Amanda Craig’s new novel, Love in Idleness, is published by Little,Brown £12.99

The Daily Telegraph, September 2003