Letter: Gender neutral

Sir: Natasha Walter's belief (Weekend, 19 September) that Jeanette Winterson's new novel is 'the first . . . to leave its narrator without a gender' is somewhat wide of the mark. Sara Caudwell has written three of the wittiest detective stories of the past decade around the narrations of Professor Hilary Tamar, to whom the author, I understand, refuses to assign a sex; and there are few if any clues in the narrative to suggest which he/she is. (My wife and I both believe Hilary to be male; I because most female academics aren't as lazy as that, she because the other polite characters don't get up when the professor enters a room.)

Yours faithfully,

SEBASTIAN ROBINSON

Glasgow