'Ah, Jane Austen! He is such a great novelist!' That was said to me by a Hungarian émigré, who, when I mildly queried the 'he', explained: 'I find those English pronouns tiresome. We don't have them in Hungarian.' Thus I stumbled on the fact, which I report now in Mario Pei's words (and on his authority, since mine doesn't rise to vouching for a syllable of Hungarian), that 'in Hungarian the same word means "he", "she", "it".' Unless things have changed since I was there in 1973, the trams in Budapest are driven by women. Otherwise, Hungary is not a discernible jot more sex-egalitarian than Britain or the USA.

LRB 4 February 1982 | PDF Download