Modern British Women Writers
An A-to-Z GuideEdited by Vicki K. Janik and Del Ivan Janik
Emmanuel S. Nelson, Advisory Editor
Greenwood Press
Westport, Connecticut • London
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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: Modern British Women Writers: An A-To-Z Guide. Contributors: Del Ivan Janik - editor, Vicki K. Janik - editor, Emmanuel S. Nelson - editor. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: iii.
Introduction
Modern British Women Writers: each phrase within the title of this reference work implicitly calls for clarification or at least discussion. We can now look at, if not yet see, the twentieth century as a whole, recognizing that in literary terms—or indeed any terms other than the purely statistical—the isolation of a one-hundred-year period bounded by double zeros is artificial and arbitrary. Nevertheless, as a field for literary commentary, the period from (roughly) 1900 through 1999 seems to offer more than the usual justification for such an exercise. For one thing, the early decades of the century coincided with the rise of what we now call “modernism, ” not only in literature but also in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance. An early observer of modernist art might well have described it with terms such as haziness, distortion, fragmentation, and dislocation, but from the perspective of later decades the movement seems far less disturbing. One of the most persuasive and least polemical definitions of modernism is David Lodge's in Working with Structuralism (1981):
Modernism turned its back on the traditional idea of art as imitation and substituted the idea of art as an autonomous activity…. The writer's … style, however sordid and banal the experience it is supposed to be mediating, is so highly and lovingly polished that it ceases to be transparent but calls attention to itself by the brilliant reflections glancing from its surfaces. (5-6)
Lodge writes about fiction in particular, but his comments apply to modernist drama and poetry as well:
In pursuing reality out of the daylight world of empirical common sense into the individual's consciousness, or subconscious, and ultimately the collective unconscious, discarding the traditional narrative structures of chronological succession and logical cause-and-effect, as being false to the essentially chaotic and problematic nature of subjective experience, the [modern] novelist finds himself relying more and more on literary strategies that belong to poetry, and specifically to Symbolist poetry, rather than to prose. (6)
Modernism, then, offers a more internal and self-reflexive, and therefore potentially more comprehensive, window on the human condition than the approaches to art that preceded it. But Lodge warns against equating “the modern” with the art of the twentieth century. He points out that throughout the period “modernism” coexisted with what he calls “anti-modernism, ” an anachronistic but more inclusive characterization than “re-
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alism” or “traditionalism.” Lodge's definition of “anti-modernism” is simple enough:
This is writing that continues the tradition modernism reacted against. It believes that traditional realism, suitably modified to take account of changes in human knowledge and material circumstances, is still viable and valuable. Anti-modernist art does not [like modernist art] aspire to the condition of music; rather it aspires to the condition of history. (6)
Of postmodernism, a third, later-appearing strain in twentieth-century writing that is also relevant to the subject at hand, Lodge observes,
Postmodernism continues the modernist critique of traditional realism, but it tries to go beyond or around or underneath modernism, which for all its formal experiment and complexity held out to the reader the promise of meaning…. A lot of postmodernist writing implies that … whatever meaningful patterns we discern in [experience] are wholly illusory, comforting fictions. (12)
As Lodge, himself a late-twentieth-century novelist and professed antimodernist, asserts, among twentieth-century writers there was no clear chronological progression from one of these broad approaches to writing to another. This is true regardless of gender. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf, for example, may all be identified as pioneering modernists. Indeed, Woolf wrote one of the most famous and evocative definitions of modernism in prose (and, for that matter, in poetry and drama):
Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (“Modern Fiction, ” 106)
Any reader of Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse soon recognizes the ways in which Woolf practiced the imperatives implied in this statement. The almost seamless interweavings of perspectives and modes of perception in Mrs Dalloway and the shifting focuses and asymmetricality of the three “chapters” of To the Lighthouse are applications, conscious or not, of the principles outlined in “Modern Fiction.” In the ensuing three-quarters of the century Woolf's example was perhaps followed less often in terms of structure or point of view than in sensibility. Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, constructed their novels fairly conventionally, but gave their characters the kind of subtlety or indeterminacy of thought that we find in Woolf's.
The antimodernist or realist approach to writing also flourished throughout the century, among women writers as well as men. It is most obviously to be seen in the mystery fiction of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and P.D. James, where tightly constructed plots and traditional characterizations are essential to the genre. But it is equally apparent in the work of writers as different as Barbara Pym and Iris Murdoch. Postmodernism is generally considered a phenomenon of the final quarter of the century, but Woolf's Between the Acts, with its multiple focus on the playwright, the production of her play, and the play-behind-the-play, as well as its attention to the intersection of history and the immediate present, was postmodernist work from the pen of a “modernist” back in 1941. Other more recent examples include Ann Jellicoe's The Knack (1964), Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (1987), and of course A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), with its vertiginously entertaining and highly literate interweaving of the antics of contemporary critics with the lives and works of
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nineteenth-century poets and lovers. To write of twentieth-century literature, then, is not to pinpoint a particular manner or style. It includes the modernism of Woolf or Sitwell, the traditionalism or antimodernism of Pym and Sayers, and the postmodernism of Byatt or Caryl Churchill.
Furthermore, not all of the events of the twentieth century that affected the lives, works, and livelihoods of British women writers were literary. That is, they were not necessarily matters of writers reading other writers and adapting, modifying, or reacting against their techniques and ideas. The achievement of women's suffrage, the continuing pace of urbanization, the movement of women (in Britain, very gradual) into stereotypically “male” occupations, the redefinitions of class, power, and prestige that were effected, at least in part, by two world wars, the loss of Britain's international dominance, and the shifts of the political spectrum over both the short and long terms—all of these were at least equally important. In the more immediately artistic sense, the possibilities offered to women writers by the proliferation of small and specialized journals, presses, and fringe theaters—and most notably, the reemergence and growth in the final quarter of the century of the political and cultural feminist movements—contributed to the emergence of an identifiable “women's” literature. It gradually became easier for women writers to get their work published and performed: consider the distance between Woolf's lament in A Room ofOne's Own that Jane Austen had found it necessary to hide her manuscript of Pride and Prejudice at the approach of visitors (67) and that as late as 1928 one could read in the New Criterion that “female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex” (75) and the founding in 1973 of Virago Press, a female and feminist publisher of reprints of “lost” works by writers like Vera Brittain and Rosamond Lehmann as well as new books by Angela Carter, Pat Barker, and Molly Keane and pertinent nonfiction such as Amrit Wilson's Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (1978) and The Heart ofthe Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain by Beverley Brian, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe (1985). Virago's success undoubtedly contributed to the interest of “mainstream” publishers in contemporary women's writing. Whether or not Woolf's wish for her fellow women writers—an income of £500 a year and a lock on the door—had come true, by the end of the century their chances for professional respect and public success had improved immeasurably.
The writers showcased by Virago Press have not been exclusively British, for they include Irish women like Molly Keane, Canadians like Margaret Atwood, and Americans from Willa Cather to Marilyn French. The scope of the present reference volume is more restricted. Because one volume could not possibly begin to do justice to the literature written by women in the twentieth century in both the United Kingdom and Ireland, it consciously excludes Irish writers except for those who, like Elizabeth Bowen, made their reputations or lived for substantial portions of their lives in the United Kingdom other than Northern Ireland. Not by design, most of the writers treated here are English rather than Scottish or Welsh. Not a few were, or are, émigrés from countries of the former British Empire or Commonwealth, like Katherine Mansfield, Fleur Adcock, and Doris Lessing, and, more recently, women of color like Kamala Markandaya from India and Buchi Emecheta from Nigeria. The increase in ethnic diversity is a trend that of course reflects the United Kingdom's accelerating evolution toward a multiethnic society; we can already recognize in Britain the beginnings of a proliferation of the kind of literature of immigration and assimilation that flourished in the United States a century earlier. It is significant that the most admired and most widely discussed
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new British novelist of the first year of the twenty-first century was Zadie Smith, a then twenty-four-year-old London-born writer of Jamaican and English parentage.
The final terms of this reference book's title, “women writers, ” probably raise the most difficult issue: to what extent is writing by women a distinguishable subset of the writing of any period or nation? One could finesse the question by asserting that women writers are, after all, writers who happen to be women, and that like their male counterparts they have written in a wide variety of genres and styles on a wide variety of subjects. But such an attempt at declassification would ignore the many critics who have made valuable observations in defining “women's” writing—British, twentieth-century, or otherwise. Perhaps more important, it would run counter to the judgments of readers of both sexes who are aware—sometimes painfully aware—of the historic and contemporary contrasts and inequities between female and male experience, and who see intimations and reflections of them in fiction, poetry, and drama by women.
As might be expected, there is not much agreement about the nature of “women's” writing. Elaine Showalter, in her 1977 study A Literature ofTheir Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, sees women as a “subculture” who have had to make a special effort at self-definition and self-assertion, much like any other “minority group” (11). Showalter describes a three-part historical development: the first, “Feminine, ” stage, which she identifies with Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontës, was marked by the internalization of the dominant (male) tradition's standards. In the second, “Feminist, ” stage, lasting roughly from 1880 to 1920, women writers protested against these standards, often in the context of the movement for women's suffrage. The third, “Female” stage, which Showalter identifies with Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and their twentieth-century successors, has involved an inward-turning process of identity seeking and self-discovery (20). According to Showalter, Richardson, Mansfield, and Woolf “created a deliberate female aesthetic, which transformed the feminine code of self-sacrifice into an annihilation of the narrative self, and applied the cultural analysis of the feminists to words, sentences, and structures of language in the novel” (33). Woolf and her contemporaries “tried to create a power base in inner space, an aesthetic that championed the feminine consciousness and asserted its superiority to the public, rationalist, masculine world” (298).
Two years earlier, Sydney Janet Kaplan had offered a definition of such a feminine consciousness:
[Dorothy Richardson's] discoveries are concerned with state of being and not with state of doing. Miriam [Henderson, Richardson's protagonist] is aware of “life itself”; of the atmosphere of the table rather than of the table; of the silence rather than the sound. Therefore she adds an element to her perception of things which has not been noticed before or, if noticed, has been guiltily suppressed. (79)
Kaplan sees in Woolf's narrative style, too, an expression of a uniquely feminine perceptivity that recognizes the unity of things: “The kind of movement from self to the object of perception, to past and immediate past and present, the movement from perception to reflection and back again is characteristic of these sentences which illustrate the movements of the mind” (82). Maggie Humm points to Doris Lessing as a later exemplar of “feminine consciousness, ” noting that her novels “never have one simple and overarching structure” (520). Furthermore, Lessing herself insists that women's very thought processes simply differ from men's: “[T]hat's how women see things. Everything is a sort of continuous creative stream” (qtd. in Humm 52). While many early attempts to define women's writing focused on psychology and language, Humm and other critics of the
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1980s and 1990s began to put increasing emphasis on social and political factors. Humm refers to “borders” of genre, history, sexual preference, politics, and race, noting the emergence and importance of Asian and black women “writing in tandem about racism and sexism … [in] protest about the experience of Black women in Britain” (57). Flora Alexander writes, “Gender must be placed alongside, for example, social class and cultural background, as one of a set of interesting factors that produce a woman's use of language” (8). Furthermore, Alexander is apparently unconcerned by the acknowledged or recognized influences of male writers on their female counterparts, like Henry James's on Byatt or William Wordsworth's on Drabble: “ 'You are what you eat, ' says Angela Carter, referring to the formation of her imagination, and the same is surely true of use of language. Some feminists would regard this as colonization of the female by the male, but such analysis proceeds from an unsatisfactorily narrow view of literary value” (9). Anthea Trodd reminds us that writing by British women—even in the half-century most closely associated with modernism—was exceedingly diverse, and asserts that characterizations of “female consciousness” like Kaplan's based on the styles of Woolf and Richardson are simply inadequate: