As the saying goes , 'Behind every great man there has always been a woman ' yet , and it can not be denied , that behind every great woman there has always been a woman , herself !!!!
Don't get me wrong , I am not here to shout out about equality of the sexes , fighting the fight of Germaine Greer , an Australian academic writer and feminist of the 70s , and The Female Eunuch ( google search ! ) . Everyone knows that 'Women who seek equality with men are not setting their standards very high ' , quotation found in Bath Cathedral shop on last years school trip !
Joking aside , what I want to say is that some women writers do today , and have done for a while , a pretty good job and they should be given their due . I dedicate this post to female authors in the English speaking world and I hope that those I foget here will forgive me for my stupidity and lack of knowledge !
I would like to start by mentioning Aphra Behn , a 17th century female author who , according to Virginia Woolf should not be forgotten for the following reasons : ' All women together , ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn ....... for it is she who earned them the right to speak their minds ! '
Quite something ! However if you you delved into her life and works you would probably agree :
She is one of the first writers to treat the problem of racism in her work and if only for this she must be recognised as a 'decent ' person . She wrote a novel , one of the earliest English novels and one of the earliest by a woman , entitled Oroonoko or The Royal Slave which is a love story between an African Kings grandson and his top general's daughter , Imoindra . The King of the time also had his eye on Imoindra and when he learnt that she and Oroonoko were in love sold them as slaves . They were sent to Surinam , a former English colony in the West Indies to work on the sugarcane plantations . A bit of a let down , don't you think ? Anyway Oronooko was not to take things lightly and after many attempts to escape , revolt and generally create havoc for all he decided to kill his beloved and himself so that they would no longer fall into the hands of 'the enemy' ! This plot sounds pretty familiar or at least certain suicidal desires ! Unfortunately he was stopped before he could kill himself and was then dealt with in the normal fashion , that is to say , very cruelly by the masters !!!!
You can wipe your tears before we continue ! This novel , not only gives us a wonderful love story but also tells us about how slaves were treated at the time . Don't forget we are in the 17th century here !!! Also it is a women who is talking , and that is something ! If you ever study the subject of slavery and the abolition of the slave trade Aphra Behn's name is now quoted along side those of other campaigners such as John Newton and of course William Wilberforce ! DON'T forget it !!!
Almost a century later there were other voices , those who had to defy their era , even write under a masculine pen name in order to be published and read : Mary Shelly , Frankenstein ; Jane Austen , Pride and Prejudice ; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights ; Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre ;
Wuthering Heights then Pride and Prejudice
Frankenstein
George Eliot , The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch .
Each of them writing about their times and society ( 19th century ), relationships , social classes , new sciences as well as the position and psychology of men and of course women in it . We must not forget Elisabeth Gaskell and North and South , the novel which talks about the differences between parts of the same country , people and 'ways of doing things' , as the heroine says . Here is the short trailer but if you are interested you should go to You Tube where you can find a BBC adaptation in four episodes , each in seven parts ....... Gaskell's work is in the same
vein as Dickens' but had you heard of her before today ?
Then come the 'modernists' , if we may call them so , experimenting with writing , the art of the novel and breathing life into their characters by using ' the stream of consciousness ' technique , interior monologues , flash backs and subjectivity .
The exterior often reflects the interior and we become aware of what makes someone tick as never before . Writers like Virginia Woolf , in Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse for example
and Katherine Mansfield in Bliss in which she resuscitates her childhood in New Zealand can easily compete with their fellow male authors using the same techniques namely James Joyce in The Dubliners , and come out feeling happy with themselves !
We must not forget the novelist and suffragist May Sinclair who ,incited by her war experience ( WW1) when she served as an ambulance driver began to write poetry and then novels .
The next group of writers could be known as those on the way to freedom , freedom from the gender role , difficult political situations , family traditions and religious obligations , philosophical freedom .
Let's consider that prolific and highly professional writer Iris Murdoch who thought 'The artist's duty ( was) to art , to truth-telling in his own medium '. She often treated religious and philosophical subjects but tried to avoid the clear political .
Then there is Angela Carter who said , and here I quote ' A day without an argument is like a day without salt ' What an idea ! However if you think about it she was probably right . It just goes to show her vivacious character and when one reads her obituary from The Observer , a British weekly newspaper and magazine , this fighting spirit and open-mindedness is emphasized
' She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing for her was outside the pale : she wanted to know about everything and everyone and everyplace and everyword. She relished life and language highly, and revelled in the diverse . '
Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer , both born and raised outside of the British Isles , the former to British parents in Iran but spent her childhood in Zimbabwe and the second in South Africa where she has always lived and fought against injustice in all its forms . They have both received the Nobel Prize for Literature and rightly so .
Another Nobel Prize winner is Toni Morrison , the author of Beloved and many other works recalling , relating , shouting out against the Joe Crow laws , segregation , the KKK and general bad treatment of the AfroAmerican population in the States .
I could not leave this section without mentioning Jean Rhys , born of a Welsh father and a third generation creole Dominican mother , she arrived in England at the age of sixteen where she studied and lived before travelling to the Continent , Paris in fact , where certain of her few novels were set . However the novel which I find most interesting is Wide Sargasso Sea which is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre . What a powerful novel about the dominance and dependence , ruling and being ruled through the lives of an English ' gentleman ' and a 'subject /object' from the Caribbean islands . If you have read Jane Eyre or seen the movie , if not watch the following trailer , the mad lady who burns down the ' gentleman's ' mansion is the heroine of Jean Rhys' novel . Ask yourself how did she become like that ? Find out by reading the novel . There is also a film which I've never seen , because once I've read a book and thoroughly enjoyed it I don't want to be disappointed by a bad interpretation . Enjoy it's trailer too but I have the feeling it's not quite as good as the book !
Jane Eyre Wide Sargasso Sea
Don't forget Anita Brookner , of Polish Jewish descent who changed her name to make it sound more British , and published her first at the age of 53 about isolation , emotional solitude and the difficulties for immigrants of fitting into the host society .
Barbara Pym , another Booker prize winner wrote in a comical , ironical way about similar isolation problems . Muriel Spark did likewise .
' Elementary my dear Watson 'About the time that truly British detective ,Sherlock Holmes ,was spouting off to his friend in crime solving many a woman writer was putting her hand to keeping our minds working over time in order to find out ' who dun it ? '
The Queen of Crime being of course Agatha Christie . Who has not read Ten Little Niggers or Murder on the Orient Express ?. Who has never heard of Hercule Poirot , her Belgian detective and Miss Jane Marple ? This latter sounds much more English , don't you think ? Did you know that her books , according to The Guiness book of Records , are best sellers , on a par with Shakespeare's, second only to the Bible and Disney Production Works !!!! Come on , give her her due , even if you are not a real fan of detective novels !
Kathleen Raine , Anne Perry , Margery Allington , Dorothy L. Slayers and Ruth Rendell are all 'masters' of this same genre !
