Olivia Manning on the perils of the female writer

An undistinguished male writer said to me: "i've never read your books because I never read anything written by women." I asked him why and he had the grace to sound apologetic: "You see, I can never get over the idea that women are here to serve the men." At that moment the teenage daughter of our American hostess entered, wearing a sweat-shirt with the inscription: "You've come a long way, baby." I wondered.

I suppose we have come quite a way in the last five years. Militant Libbers are fighting, not only against the proscriptions of a Stone Age religion but against that suspicion, implanted in women by centuries of brain-washing, that to be born female is to be born inferior. A women journalist, writing of women Fellows of the Royal Society who supported an anti-nuclear meeting, said in her column 'They would have been better employed cooking their husbands' dinners.' Another woman journalist, given to jeering at women novelists, said, when accused of disliking her sex: "I don't mind women who talk about 'their children but I've no use for women who try to be men." Both women, of course, were sick, and not only with envy. They were in the wretched condition of slaves who try to gain credit by attacking their own kind.

Women receive

the insults of men with tolerance, , having been bitten in the nipple by their toothless gums

wrote Dilys Laing who died in 1960. Had she lived another ten years she would have seen tolerance change to impatience. Women have tolerated too much. They are at last uniting in appreciation of women's achievements and here are four admirable books to prove it. The writers, all women, enquire into the minds and condition of other :women. They occasionally criticise but there is not a single sneer or jibe among them.

In Reader, I Married Him* Patricia Beer quotes from Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot to reveal the social attitudes and sexual bias that influenced their creation of female characters. It is a scholarly and ambitious attempt to collate the ambiguities of four major writers at work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. None of them, it seems, escaped the conditioning of their sex. Miss Mitford described Jane Austen as a "husband-hunting butterfly" and Miss Beer's researches show that this was not altogether unjust. Miss Austen wrote: "I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress."

She was, her letters show, concerned to prove herself as silly • as could be, arid how better to reassure the hovering male? Charlotte Brontd, born the year before Jane Austen's death, lived in more advanced times yet was beset by yearnings for a Master. She idolised the unresponsive M. Heger and could write "Low at my master's knee I bent, the offered crown to meet" and so on. Shirley, sopposed to be a portrait of Emily, states "Did I not say I prefer a master? One in whose presence I shall feel obliged and disposed to be good." Here we may not recognise Emily but we do recognise the creator of Mr Rochester.

In Seduction and Betrayals Elizabeth Hardwick also deals with Charlotte Bronte, and with Emily and Anne, seeing them as a phenomenon — "nothing is easier than to imagine all of them dying unknown, their works lost." Her enquiry into the female mind leads her much further afield than Miss Beer but her studies of Ibsen's women, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle, Virginia Woolf, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath are not so much profound as incisive and epigrammatic. They first appeared in the New York Review of Books, of which Miss Hardwick is advisory editor, and are linked only by the fact that each deals with real or imaginary women. The most substantial of these pieces dissects the not always resolved complexities of Ibsen's female characters while the most sympathetic gives us insight into the character and suicide of Sylvia Plath. The essay called :Zelda' is really a review of Nancy Milford's book of the same name and one wonders who originally dug up the information contained in it. Miss Hardwick is interesting on the subject of the relationship of Dorothy and William Wordsworth (not so innocent as she appears to think) and the odd life together of Jane and Thomas Carlyle. In the final essay, that gives its title to the book, the author pursues with breathless brilliance the literary history of seducers and , seduced from Don Giovanni through Hawthorne, George Eliot, Dreiser, Tolstoi, Richardson, Hardy and Zola (in that order), justly concluding that The Pill has deprived writers of one of the world's great plots.

Heroines In Love t with its art deco cover is probably the book most readers would pick up first. On the face of it, it would seem that Mirabel Cecil has found herself a vastly

The

Spectator December 7, 1974 amusing subject but the subject matter proves disappointing. Miss Cecil's own writing is perceptive and entertaining and no doubt the attitudes of popular heroines have changed. much as the attitudes of shop-wind°W dummies have changed, but the fact remeinns that romantic fiction, whether written in Fit or in 1974, is tedious stuff. The constant goal al "love, true love" quickly cloys while the advice to the lovelorn, a usual feature of women's magazines, makes Jane Austen's husbandhunting seem infantile in its innocence. Recently, while waiting my turn at the dentist's, I read the answer to a girl who complained of the demands made by her fiance.

"Give in to him now," wrote Marjorie Moon you have got him." once shine, "Think of all you will get out of him

She put her head deeper into the curve of Bill's shoulder. 'Thank you,' she said softly 'for a verY special evening — and for a very special life.' Let us compare this Happy Housewife from Woman's Own with excerpts from Alice Thornton's autobiography in By a Woman Writ. Mrs Thornton (1627-1707) describes vividly her nine pregnancies and the sufferings of her lying-in. Six of her children died and she herself came close to death several times. Her sister, Lady Danby, gave birth to sixtee", children, six of them stillborn. With her les' son, who came "double into the world", she tasti in labour for fourteen days. The little boy 01' of smallpox the following summer. ' Joan Goulianos has collected together in this book, the writings of women, mostly obscure' who dealt truthfully with woman's life. M8,11 Shelley, in her diary, poignantly shows us the loneliness of widowhood while her mother' Mary Wollstonecraft, writes passionatelY defence of women as thinking, indepencle9: beings. Harriet Martineau, a strong spirit an°2 very forceful writer, describes a visit to a hare"; and rightly condemns a system that keege women enclosed. I also visited a harem in Middle East and was painfully conscious of En_ boredom and narrowness of the womendetained in it, but I noted that British offiei,an tended to treat the Mohammedan institunoit with a half-envious respect. Men find Ao convenient to exclude women even if they not actually shut them away. When wulnie already covered from head to foot, attend „ mosque, they are required to hide behind; curtain. I asked an attendant why this feh necessary and he said that the sight of won; re might distract men from their devotions. ? we completely free from this sort of inecluitYe, Jonathan Miller, when a student at Cambri",god told me he had been elected an Apostle and '!on approached E. M. Forster with the suggestibe that a few exceptional young women might admitted to the group. Forster shook his ned, The presence of young women would, he salte

h '

tdisatrt was their imeanfrom the elevated mental state that Goulianos's anthology offers a powel answer to all the prejudices against

women have to contend. Olive Schrwerirliteu_jti Dorothy Richardson, the coloured

Margaret Walker, Dilys Laing whose poe112„t quote above, and Muriel Rukeyser are eloque„." in their defence of women, answering r",: charge that "to be a woman and a writer'si double mischief." By a Woman Writ is the 19%, anthology of its kind produced by the 010:ee ment for women's freedom. From it we May that women, once known as The Sex to denuoily a part cut offIrom the norm, are wunder,r„ve diverse and diversely wonderful. They u,r.be achieved much, and yet . . . and Yet • mosque attendant told me that, when _en women were permitted to mingle with the Ted but I doubt whether Jonathan Miller sugge!":01, to Forster that the Apostles admit older wort, intellectuals who would be no more 0' distraction than Forster himself. with the "Look a this little chin, Waldo, a is but a small part of my person; but though I had wledge of all things under the sun, and the ,„'eerri to use it, and the deep loving heart of an he. it would not stead me through life like this little

c

till think she should have said "stead me e r°tigh Youth" for beauty is brief and the ,.ii.-heauty without reserves is liable to sink into pity and the gin bottle. w, (3; arrn yourself, baby. You've come a long out you're not there yet.

°Ifyia Manning, the novelist, has most recently written The Rain Forest.