"Men writing as women and women writing as men"

Charles Dickens

In Bleak House modest, virtuous Esther Summerson tells the story of her involvement in the tortuous lawsuit of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. The heartstrings are tugged when she tells us of losing her bloom after catching smallpox, but we know that her author will pair her up with the handsome young doctor.

Lloyd Jones

Jones re-envisions Dickens's Great Expectations in a novel set on an island off Papua New Guinea. Mister Pip is narrated by 13-year-old Matilda, who becomes obsessed by the novel when it is read to her by Mr Watts, the last white person she knows. She sympathises painfully with Dickens's Pip, but can never quite be like him.

What are the benefits and limitations of this approach?

Why do other authors, like McEwan, take the opposite approach?

I think that the benefits are depending the situation, but if the author is writing by the opposite sex, we may think that it will have benefits. The limitations I think that are principally not thinking as a male/female, we have diferent point of views and ways to expresse ourselves, that is the principal difficulty.

Its natural that an author is writing about a character of the same gender, when the authors do the opposite, they have to think that on that way their novel or short story will be better written.