We, Uncle James
I ASKED one 'of the authors whose work is discussed in this
book whether she " wrote as a woman." " Certainly nnt," she answered indignantly ; " I write al a human being."
It might, I suppose, be argued that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice as a tract for the better echication of women, or that in (say) Bliss Katherine Mansfield set out to show how a woman can be hurt by faithlesi man ; but there is a vastly simpler way of looking at them which does not seem to occur to the serious student.of feminism. - Miss Lawrence is a most diligent research student. She presents to " our clinically trained modern minds-" a survey of English and American women writers—mainly, novelists— from Mary Wollstonecraft and - Jane Austen to Miss Rose Macaulay, Miss Rebecca West, Mrs. Virginia Woolf, and the other outstanding writers of today. Plots are summarised, characters analysed, tendencies neatly docketed in terms of father-fixations, traumata, repressions, and the rest of the clinical " phraseology ; and, dragooned by the relentless good sense of her modern and educated outlook, the whole long procession is seen to pick up its skirts and march dutifully forward behind the banner of the feminist cause.
Neither in general nor in particular questions does she see any cause for uncertainty.
" Desirability in women only affects men in relation to its reaction upon themselves. That is, a man looking at a woman and thinking he would like to possess her is motivated by a subtle reversion of interest to himself. She looks like a prize ; therefore, the man who has her must be quite a man. That is the story."
This book will really come into its own in another generation
or so, when to our present examination nightmares, such as " Compare the attitude to nature of Crabbe and Goldsmith," will be added (for example) " Contrast the use of tragic irony in the works of E. M. Delafield and of Rose Macaulay."
Anxious students will then be able to ascertain from it that Edna Ferber " is the supreme fictional analyst of careerist women in the heyday of their careers in the United States," or that Miss Phyllis Bottome is modern " in her delineation of the sexual attraction as having several aliases." And perhaps, by then, it will not seem odd to find a' lot of these writers referred to simply by their surnames :
" With Mansfield, Cather has freedom from the prevailing sex resentment of women and from their enthusiasm over a new order of things . for them in their worlds."
—a freedom, one is tempted to add, which Lawrence does not seem to share with them. She admits that men exist : indeed, they are women's principal bugbear : but nowhere in this book could I find any indication that there are such things as male novelists, or that women novelists not only read their works but respect and enjoy them, and ask nothing better than that their own writings should take some sort of place in the grand tradition of English literature. They write, in fact, as human beings.
We Write as Women contains a number of shrewd remarks , and appraisals, and is as comprehensive as a study can be which leaves out half its subject. Its gravest drawback (within these limits) is that the remarks about modem authors are almost all based upon one book only, and that one appar- ently chosen quite haphazard. Miss Rosamond Lehmann, for instance, is represented by The Weather in the Streets, but neither Dusty Answer, A Note in Music, nor Invitation to the Waltz is so much as mentioned. Among its dicta are the statements that (1) Mary Webb was " the greatest of the women mystics writing in English," and (2) All Passion Spent is a poignant story of a woman's heart-hunger : judge- ments which, even from the laboratory point of view, leave
Previous page
