Maureen Freely: If women can stand competition, why not men?

"We just can't compete with authors like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth," said David Storey

Does the name Ann Patchett mean anything to you? Don't be embarrassed if it doesn't. She's made two appearances on the Orange prize shortlist in the space of four years, but before Tuesday her only claim to fame was that the bookies had deemed her the darkest horse in this year's race. When Sue McGregor stood up in front of an audience of a thousand and one literati to announce that the winner was Ann Patchett, nine hundred and ninety-nine of them came close to spilling their champagne.

By and large, their gasps were friendly. Patchett had already made a rather racy speech that turned her into a strong audience favourite. Almost no one had actually read her book, but lots of people said it sounded promising. But even they couldn't quite make sense of it all. When you thought about the people Patchett was up against, you had to wonder what the judges were thinking of. Why not Maggie Gee's brilliant, ground-breaking novel about British racism? Why not Helen Dunmore's stunning novel about the siege of Leningrad? Why not Anna Burns or Chloe Hooper, or the bookies' favourite, Sarah Waters?

The one thing that no one talked about was the nationality question. No one saw it as at all sinister that the judges had passed over four British and one Commonwealth author to give the prize to an American. It's not as if it was the first time, after all. Since its inception seven years ago, the Orange prize has been open to all women writing in English. So far it's gone twice to British authors, twice to Canadians, twice to Americans and once to an Australian. While a few Orange judges have used their time in the limelight to extol the vibrancy of Fiction Elsewhere and bemoan the Morbid State of Fiction Here, no one could argue that the prize itself has been unfair to British authors. And neither could any argue that British authors can't hold their own in a list that includes Americans.

But, strangely enough, that's exactly what a lot of very important people said only two weeks ago, when the Man Group, the sponsors of the Booker, announced that it would be open to American fiction from 2004. Oh the horror! The horror! The very thought made literary teeth chatter.

It was, said The Times, nothing less than "a threat to the celebration of our great literary traditions". The Guardian's straw poll of British heavies yielded mixed but deeply thoughtful results. McEwan the Fearless and Ishiguro the Intrepid were of the view that we might just be strong enough to meet the mighty opposition. And even if we weren't, it would (as M the F put it) be "pathetically weak-minded" to shy away from the challenge. David Storey wasn't so sure, though. "We just can't compete with authors like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth," he said. Bernice Rubens thought so, too. "I don't think we can compete against the Americans. We're pygmies in comparison. Look at Toni Morrison – you'd never get a black writer like that here, or a Roth or a Bellow."

To understand what we were up against, all you had to do was think what would have happened had we let them in sooner."Setting previous Booker champs against winners of the Pulitzer prize for fiction, you would have had some hot, publicity-generating contests," John Mullan conceded. But how well would our boys have fared if it had been Roth v McEwan in 1998, or Richard Ford v Graham Swift in 1996, or, God forbid, Norman Mailer v William Golding in 1981? Don't even ask, was the response from James Wood.

The only solid area of agreement was that the subject could not be broached without constant references to the boxing ring. Even the eminent Lisa Jardine could not resist the temptation. She's in the don't-let-them-in camp, by the way. She's worried about American "heavyweights" such as Philip Roth, not just because they would make mincemeat of your McEwans and your Amises, but also because they would drown out the "voice of the Commonwealth".

She did not seek to draw parallels with the Orange prize. But it is probably worth mentioning that Jardine has herself served as an Orange judge. The shortlist that year had a marked North American bias, and the prize ended up going to Anne Michaels, a Canadian. But if you put all seven shortlists together, the list of the big Americans who have not walked off with a cheque for £30,000 gets curiouser and curiouser. Toni Morrison was shortlisted for the Orange prize but did not win it. Neither did Anne Tyler, Amy Tan, E Annie Proulx, Barbara Kingsolver or Jane Smiley.

Strange as it may seem, Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler and E Annie Proulx also featured as examples of unfair competition in the recent Booker panic. Why did nobody remember that actually they've already competed in the international arena and failed to win? It's not as if the Orange prize is insignificant. Not only was it fatter than the Booker when it started; but, like the Booker, it's created stars and bestsellers. There is, I think, only way to explain the mass amnesia: people just don't take the Orange prize as seriously as the Booker. They don't take it as seriously because it just can't compete against the heavyweights. It just can't compete against the heavyweights because it's just a bunch of women.

This, in fact, has been the leitmotif in most of its press cuttings. The tune keeps changing: in the beginning the main concern was that that the prize existed at all. Women won the Booker sometimes, didn't they? So why the hysterical clamour for a Prize of One's Own? Last year, it was the all-woman panel that critics couldn't stomach. Looking at the very different choices of the (Orange-appointed) men's panel, they said it proved that women had very different, and sometimes questionable, literary tastes. This allowed for the revival of the tired old Shakespeare's sister debate. We can't be geniuses like men because we can't engage with history or war or politics. Instead we stay indoors, sighing about the housework, knitting ever more intricate affairs of the heart.

But it's just not so – as anyone who looks at women writers appearing on any serious shortlist could confirm. Who says woman can't write about war? Look at Pat Barker. Who says that women can't write big novels that engage with history and politics? Linda Grant said so when she won the Orange prize two years ago, but she is living proof that women can and do. And it's not a recent phenomenon, either. Doris Lessing was doing it when AS Byatt and Rose Tremain were babies.

This year's Orange shortlist is not short on love interests. They are full of traditionally female themes, but they also feature terrorists, racists, sectarian violence, political intrigue, mass extermination and war. They might all be by women, but they are not only about women. Rather, they depict the world as their female authors see it. Taken together, they might be bolder than the books most women were writing 10 years ago. That in itself could be seen as the Orange Effect. The prize may not be what is encouraging more women to write on larger canvases. But it's certainly not discouraging them, either.

There is no doubt that it's raised the profile of fiction by women in the international arena. It's also, if only by inference, allowed readers to see how diverse anglophone literary culture is, and how much cross-fertilisation is going on across national borders. No wonder the men at Man want to bring it all under one roof. But really boys, you've got to admit it. We got there first.

mfreely@rosebud.u-net