Words of Love

The Guardian publishes a new review of Words of Love: Passionate Women from Heloise to Sylvia Plath by Pamela Norris (Harper Collins) that was already mentioned on this blog previously. This time the mentions to the Brontës are more precise. The reviewer, Kathryn Hugues, is not really very happy with the book:

Norris's book is a curiously old-fashioned one, situated in a way of thinking about women's writing that looks back to the 1980s, when every clever girl went about with a copy of Elaine Showalter's classic doorstop A Literature of Their Own weighing down her bag, leaving her with one shoulder slightly lower than the other. The emphasis in those days was on "recovery", identifying the lost heritage of female writing and literary experience that Virginia Woolf had so mourned in A Room of One's Own. Until those "foremothers" - everyone from Margery Kempe to Dorothy Richardson via Aphra Behn and the Brontës - had been shaken out from the folds of patriarchal literary history and marshalled into an orderly queue, women would be obliged to write into a void, howling their words into the wilderness.

Feminist literary criticism has, of course, moved on since those days, when you could be forgiven for thinking that every female writer in history was either immured or mad (The Madwoman in the Attic was, indeed, the other must-have 80s text for worried-looking girls with an itch to scribble). But Norris seems still to be languishing in a vale of tears where to be female (or rather to be a female writer - a distinction she never quite attends to) is to be left waiting for something: a lover, a letter, professional recognition, a signal to suggest that one is not, after all, quite forgotten.

There is also something rather dusty about Norris's choice of case histories, the "passionate women" who march down the spine of her narrative. So, once again, we have Christine de Pizan getting righteously angry about the misogynistic worm nestling at the heart of Jean de Meun's chivalric Roman de la Rose. From there it's a short sprint to Charlotte Brontë writing her anguished letters to Constantin Heger, the married schoolmaster who will not return her love. (...) Over the past 30 years these biographical narratives have become classics in their own right, taking equal space alongside their fictional and poetic reworkings in Aurora Leigh, Night and Day or The Bell Jar. Indeed, in some cases the biography has swamped the work - for every 20 people who know what happened to Plath in that last freezing winter of 1962-63 there is probably only one who has tussled with the Ariel poems. Villette is still regularly scanned for clues as to what really went on during Brontë's tormented time at the Heger pensionnat. By simply retelling these fragments of life-writing rather than taking them apart, Norris is in danger of permanently consigning writing women of all temperaments and historical moments to a kind of weepy, inky sisterhood. (...)

Categories: In_the_News, Books