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 19th
century, who were able to find a creative space in their social exclusion to
write against the grain and combat violence.
