A few years ago, my students started to use a word I hadn’t heard before. They’d say a character or a situation was ‘relatable.’ Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester was relatable, but her friendship with scholarly and pious Helen Burns wasn’t. Lydia Bennett’s penchant for shopping was relatable. They meant that certain courses of action were familiar to them, that they could see themselves in the novels we were reading in class. To some extent, this recognition was useful to me, because I could use it to show how literary texts are complex, living beings that contain their own contradictions. Austen leaves us space to understand Lydia as well as her superior sisters. Like any first-person narrator, Jane Eyre is not wholly reliable, there’s some sly invitation to readerly irritation with the saintly Helen. I like readers to learn to trust their instincts, to see that their emotional responses to novels are anticipated by the words on the page.

But there is a problem with ‘relatability’ as well, especially when it’s used as a standard of merit. Naturally, the books that are most relatable to me are likely to concern the lives of educated women, probably mothers, probably white and heterosexual, in European cities. (There are some outstanding novels in this category: I don’t suggest that there’s any particular correlation between literary merit and identity markers.) It’s not very hard for me to find fiction that’s ‘relatable’, that mirrors my own assumptions and experience of the world, because people like me write books and publish them. I find that fiction and I read it, often with pleasure and sometimes with admiration, but I look for books of all kinds that are not ‘relatable’ to me, books that are windows more than mirrors. If fiction has a moral purpose – it doesn’t have to have a moral purpose – it’s in letting us see our shared world from places other than our own and through eyes other than our own, giving us versions of human experience and history and geography that are not at all ‘relatable.’

Writers of all kinds make windows not mirrors. We make stuff up, that’s our job. We imagine realities we have not experienced. I’m not suggesting that readers should avoid work by writers whose lives are like their own, because even within our tight little boxes of class and gender and national identity and ethnicity and religion and all the others, there are various and incompatible experiences. Some readers have told me that the relationship between Ally and her mother in Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children is implausible because ‘no mother treats her own child like that’, that Anna’s desperation in Night Waking misrepresents the experience of sleep-deprived parents, that there’s no way Adam in The Tidal Zone would be thinking about laundry while his daughter is in hospital. If the characterisation is at fault, if it seems that that fictional character could not behave in that fictional way, fine, the novel is flawed. But if the problem is that the reader’s own experience doesn’t include what she is reading about, that’s what fiction is for: a window into a world in which you may never (lucky you) walk.

‘Relatability’ is only ever a coincidence, but the kind of coincidence that happens to some people much more than others.