 |
 |
Latchkey Home Book Reviews Conference News Teaching Resources |
New Women Writers of the late nineteenth century Review by John McRae
It is good to see the always excellent Writers and their Work series enjoying a healthy revival after a difficult period. Now under the general editorship of Isobel Armstrong, and with the continued support of the British Council, it is revamping its image, updating some titles, and commissioning some new ones. Among the new titles is this bright, sensible, and highly informative introduction to ten writers who qualify in some way under that sometimes embarrassing but nevertheless lasting heading of ‘new woman’ writers. To cover ten writers in somewhere around 30,000 words (plus copious excellent notes) is a fearsome challenge (already the single author titles present a challenge in terms of extent!) But the authors address the task winningly and well. Their chosen authors (and how difficult it must have been to settle on these ten) are Emma Frances Brooke, Katherine Caffyn (‘Iota’), Mona Caird, Sarah Grand, Annie Cory (Victoria Cross), Menie Downie, Mary Dunne (George Egerton), Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), Elizabeth Robins, and Olive Schreiner. They manage their way through the confusion of pen-names, married names, and other names excellently by giving a brief biographical outline of each writer at the beginning of the book – very necessary, and almost a mini-sourcebook in itself. Other writers get more than a mention, and one is left, inevitably, wanting to know more of writers like Ella Hepworth Dixon and Mary Cholmondely, to name but two. All the writers discussed are novelists and playwrights – new women poets would be a volume in itself. I did not know all of these writers, although we have to thank Virago for bringing some of them to our notice in the green classics. Now Marion Shaw and Lyssa Randolph have done a major job of reclaiming some much less well-known writers, and placing the whole informal ‘group’ in the wider context of the period and of attitudes to them, especially in journals such as Punch. Some of the reviews and jibes they quote are still pretty shocking, and we realise that it is just a little over one hundred years since these ‘new’ women were seen as ‘odd’, to use Gissing’s word, not really meant unkindly, in The Odd Women. I think he admired the professionalism of his women characters as much as Shaw did Mrs Warren and her daughter. But much of the rest of the world of letters was more disparaging, patronising, and quite simply chauvinist. How very much things have changed, thinks this male reviewer. Clearly the focus is on the 1890s and 1900s, when the new woman’s appeal was ‘her elusiveness and her resistance to fixed categorisation’. In their opening chapter the authors sum up old saws and modern attitudes and what emerges is both the ‘sociological phenomenon’ and the ‘literary type’. There are a lot of important debates involved here, and the authors do well in summarising them, linking them to historical contexts, characters and movements (Beatrice Webb née Potter, Women’s Suffrage, for example). But inherently, they conclude, quoting Sally Ledger, that the ‘concept was, from its inception, riddled with contradictions.’ We have come a long way from George Eliot’s ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ half a century before, but the struggle of becoming, if I might quote D.H. Lawrence, was one that George Eliot could only have supported – it brought together all her political and moral and artistic concerns. But the new women never produced a writer who would be the bestseller or the outstanding literary figure that George Eliot was and that later Virginia Woolf would become. These new women are the flag-bearers in the interregnum where so many other things were going on. And all too often it was male writers, Gissing, Hardy, Ibsen, Shaw, George Moore, even Pinero, whose female characters have remained as the foremost literary emblems of women’s struggles of the time. Chapter by chapter the authors tackle the big themes (‘An Introduction to the New Woman’ and ‘Gender, Literary Value and the Woman of Genius’) before moving on to what are inevitably rather constrained treatments of ‘New Woman Writers’ Work’ and ‘New Woman Drama’ (much of which was of course written by men.). It is the first two of these chapters that give the book its academic distinction: the arguments are handled very well indeed, and there is absolutely no recourse to mind-numbing jargon. Frequently we hear a lot of nonsense about ‘the general reader’, or Virginia Woolf’s ‘common reader’ – I for one have no idea who he or she might be. But the intelligent, curious reader will get from these chapters a precise, stimulating and illuminating overview of many aspects of the political, literary and social situation in which these writers found themselves. The authors speak with authority and with commitment and enthusiasm. Doubtless they could be faulted here and there by a picky specialist with an axe to grind, but I am not he, and I came away feeling enthused and infinitely better informed than I was before, and I did consider myself reasonably au fait with the period. The style of writing is very readable, with excellent quotations and references. How often readability is adduced as some kind of a fault in academic writing! But it has always been a feature of the Writers and their Work series, and long may it continue to produce work of this quality. The two chapters on the actual texts could easily just boil down to a few summaries – it is impossibly difficult to cover such an interesting and varied range of writing. What the authors do, therefore, is tempt us with tasters, make us want to read more, take us into why these writers should be read and remembered. And that, surely, is the purpose of a book such as this. They give fascinating tasters of the plots, the characters and themes of quite a few novels and plays, a miracle of subtle and succinct sharing of knowledge. Themes such as child murder, androgyny and sexual roles, and eugenic matches will seem very modern, and they are closely linked with contemporary debates on suffrage, female roles and ‘femininity’, all of which might rather inadequately be called ‘the Woman’s Question’. Shaw made the point that ‘plays and productions by women [were] more adventurous than those by men’, so it is salutary to see writing by Elizabeth Roberts and productions by Madge Kendal receive their due attention, even though acknowledgement has to be made of the well-known figures of Beerbohm Tree and Harley Granville Barker in the staging of the plays. (It was Beerbohm Tree who notoriously was of the opinion that ‘women can’t write’. This should perhaps be placed as an ironic epigraph to the book!) The authors have no axe to grind politically – they acknowledge that some of the best new women works were written by men, not just in the drama, but also in novels by Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. But we knew about them already – to see them set beside their female forerunners and contemporaries is finally to begin to see the fuller picture The authors make very good use of other critics: Sally Ledger, Kate Flint, Penny Boumelha, and indeed of Marion Shaw’s own earlier work. The bibliography is excellent, and the extensive notes and references an immensely valuable resource which had me chasing off to look things up and find the originals, as all good notes should do. An excellent contribution to the Writer and their Work series, but more than that, this book is quite simply the very best introduction to the subject that I have had the pleasure of reading.
|
