“Outsiders – Five Women Writers” by Lyndall Gordon 20 September 2019 - Bill Doherty

As the assembled ranks of the Lit. Soc. exuded an almost tangible expectancy for the onset of mists and mellow fruitfulness they were entertained by Lyndall Gordon expatiating on her most recent book “Outsiders”. Gordon, a prolifically productive Oxford academic whose recent literary output has followed a distinctly feminist trajectory, started by introducing her outsiders to whom she allocated subsidiary roles in the manner of a medieval morality play. Mary Shelley was the Prodigy, Emily Brontë the Visionary, George Eliot the Outlaw, Olive Schreiner the Orator and Virginia Woolf the Explorer.

Individual pathways to Outsider status varied. As Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot rejected the prospect of an “unlived life” of provincial domestic drudgery looking after her widower father’s household; instead, catching the evolutionary spirit of that Darwinian age she became the first female editor of “The Westminster Journal” and an established author, albeit one who felt a male pen name necessary to smooth her career path. She  successfully  launched  “Adam Bede” in 1859. Her co-habiting with George Lewes, abandoned by Mrs Lewes in favour of a life of promiscuous carnality, made Eliot a social outcast and one of our speaker’s outsiders.  

Mental illness was Virginia Woolf’s gateway to extra-mural status. Like the explorer she was, she ruminated on formative literary influences and acknowledged that writers were initially readers. She confessed that she and her older sister, Vanessa Bell, had been trained in “tea table talk” but had been helped to achieve by being the daughters of an educated man and the product of a family whose menfolk shared the sisters’ values. She held the rejection of force to be the hallmark of the civilised man but noted with concern a female fallibility towards seduction by power and a strain of “Hitlerism” in many men. She contemplated establishing a third House of Parliament to provide a distinct feminine voice in public affairs. Professionally, she prospered in the literary safe space of domestic creativity offered by Bloomsbury, Rodmell and Charleston; a milieu whose male denizens exhibited a markedly ambiguous sexuality  

Commercially, death proved a good career move for Emily Brontë and Woolf yielding a steady, sustained demand for their works while Shelley, Eliot and Schreiner all spoke to their time. The visionary of “Wuthering Heights” was embroiled in “the world within rather than the world without” although she flung down the gauntlet of her personal credo, “no coward soul is mine” before the outside world. This challenged nineteenth century norms where “nice women were quiet” and assertion considered unwomanly.

Our speaker shared a South African upbringing with Olive Schreiner and her forename with the main protagonist in Schreiner’s landmark novel “The Story of an African Farm”(1883).Schreiner’s unflinching pacifism roused the ire of both sides in the Boer War and she was incarcerated in the “dorp” of Hanover by the British. The arrival of wounded and dying British soldiers gives her highly original feminist insights – the laboured breathing of the soldiers in their death throes was reminiscent of the newborn’s first gasps, prompting Schreiner to wonder if men’s bodies used for war represent women’s ultimate artistic masterpiece. Thought-provoking  material for an orator!     

If feminist literature has a primordial deity it is Mary Wollstonecraft, author of  “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” and mother of Mary Godwin who was to marry the poet Shelley. This tract saw the light of the Wordsworthian dawn of 1792 and each member of our eclectic quintet paid it due homage. Like Schreiner, the prodigy Mary Shelley saw war at first hand travelling through Napoleonic Europe with her husband but despite practical difficulties he always encouraged  her work and “Frankenstein” was published in 1818. Mary Shelley was the only member of this group to have any living children.   

The Lit. Soc. audience enjoyed a challenging narrative which wove biographies of five effectively motherless female authors, each with at least one foot in the 19^th century, who were able to find a creative space in their social exclusion to write against the grain and combat violence.