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The Impressive Lessons of Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (1847)

This analysis of Agnes Gray by Anne Brontë (1847) discusses the significance of the first novel by the youngest Brontë sister. Originally published in the Brontë Society Transactions (now titled Brontë Studies,Volume 21, 1993). Reprinted by permission of Timothy Whittome (Walking with Anne Brontë, 2023). 

“It leaves no painful impression on the mind — some may think it leaves no impression at all.” Thus wrote one reviewer in the Atlas on January 22, 1848. I suspect that few of Anne Brontë’s readers would easily sympathize with this view, and it is the purpose of this essay to illustrate why I disagree with the Atlas.

The reviewer also states: “There is a want of distinctness in the character of Agnes, which prevents the reader from taking much interest in her fate.”

Yet, for all this skepticism, Agnes Grey does leave an impression on the mind, and it is one not altogether without a feeling of pain, as also does the fate of Agnes, herself; arouse interest and concern.

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Learn more about Anne Brontë
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Detaching Agnes Grey from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

What is first necessary, though, is to detach the novel from both Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) because a regular misjudgment is to compare the three novels as if they were all competing and tending towards the same end.

And, in this competition, Agnes Grey, it is said, either falls by the wayside or arrives a poor third. Yet Agnes Grey is not in competition with either novel, and even if one were to pursue that line of thinking, it would be fair to say that neither Jane Eyre nor Wuthering Heights reaches the clarity and personal vision aspired to by Anne Brontë in the unfolding of Agnes’s story.

Anne reaches for a separate, and no less distinct, voice from that demonstrated by both Emily and Charlotte, and she successfully acquires that distinctiveness.

Eschewing both the “remarkable events” of Jane Eyre and the robust and colorful passion of Wuthering Heights, Anne finds a voice that is firm, persuasive, quiet, and restrained, as well as uncluttered and clear.

 

Introducing Edward Weston

From the outset, Agnes’s tale unfolds in a calm and undistracted manner. As Anne herself so often did, Agnes keeps most of her inner thoughts and pleasures to herself. Thus can Agnes’s mother say: “Mr. Weston! I never heard of him before.”

She is assured by Agnes that she has, but her mother’s confusion still typifies so much of both Anne and Agnes’s inner sense of reserve, and to pass comment on Agnes’ self-control and self-possession is also to pass similar comment on Anne’s.

Edward Weston’s ultimate engagement to Agnes also illustrates the same quietly impassioned approach by Anne Brontë to her work:

“You must have known that it was not my way to flatter and talk soft nonsense, or even to speak the admiration that I felt; and that a single word or glance of mine meant more than the honied. phrases and fervent protestations of most other men.”

Edward Weston is certainly no Edward Rochester or Heathcliff, and Anne has no urgent feeling inside her that would have created him as such, and so despite her intermittent involvement in the intrigues of Gondal, she doesn’t aspire to the style of writing so fervently adopted by Emily and Charlotte.

This is not to denigrate the achievement of either of her sisters, merely to suggest that Anne had a morally different set of values to pursue and that she successfully whispers these into the ears of her readers throughout her writing of Agnes Grey.

Thus Weston is very much “a man of strong sense, firm faith, and ardent piety, but thoughtful and stern.” He is also a man of “true benevolence, and gentle, considerate kindness.”

In Agnes’s feelings for Hatfield’s curate, Anne herself, whether subconsciously or not, by shedding some of the more flirtatious attributes of her own father’s curate, William Weightman, arrives at a more refined portrait of Weightman that is based loosely, but recognizably, on his compassionate concern for the poor of Haworth.

 

The author’s real-life parallels with her character

It is with some interest that we can pursue the thought that Agnes is nearly twenty-three when she leaves Horton Lodge to help at her mother’s school. It is then September, and in 1842, after Anne Brontë had been with the Robinson family at Thorp Green for two and a half years, William Weightman died that autumn, when Anne was also nearly twenty-three.

Therefore, what happens subsequently to Agnes in Agnes Grey is surely, in the greater part, wish fulfillment. It is significant, also, that there is such a long break with virtually no news about Weston.

His reappearance, nearly nine months later, seems so sudden; it is almost as if Anne’s imagination was reverting to those happy moments with Emily of raising people from amongst Gondal’s sleeping dead. Charlotte’s novels reveal a similar self-indulgence.

Not that Edward Weston dies, of course, but William Weightman did, and if, as seems likely, Anne had strong feelings for him, these feelings surely resurface in Agnes’ subdued, but quite ardent love for Edward Weston.

Charlotte’s portrayal to Ellen Nussey in early 1842 of a shy Anne being watched in church by William Weightman is mirrored in Anne’s portrait of Agnes, herself, in church listening to and admiring Weston’s sermons and readings. How cruel it would have been for Agnes if he had died!

Anne, therefore, uses her powerful imagination to recreate the inner turmoil of her life — a turmoil often so painfully invisible to others. Agnes also has three children, and, as Edward Chitham demonstrates in his biography of Anne. Anne in her own life may have wished for children of her own that she could both love and teach.

Yet Anne’s suggested feelings for Weightman as revealed through Agnes’s feelings for Weston and her subsequent engagement to him in a scene of perfect quiet in the town of A– are not the only themes of interest in the novel, for there are three others, at least, which are no less important, and just as revealing of Anne’s thoughts and concerns.

 

The enviable Rosalie Murray

First, there is Agnes’s complex and vivid association with Rosalie Murray. Edward Chitham suggests that Anne toys with the personality of Rosalie as she might well have grappled with an unwanted, or perhaps yearned for, part of herself, just as Emily tackles her inner persistent self in the character of Heathcliff. It is worth examining this point.

Here is Agnes deliberating on the question of beauty:

“They that have beauty, let them be thankful for it, and make a good use of it, like any other talent … it is a gift of God, and not to be despised. Many will feel this, who have felt that they could love, and whose hearts tell them they are worthy to be loved again, while yet they are debarred, by the lack of this, or some such seeming trifle from giving and receiving that happiness they seem almost made to feel and impart.

As well might the humble glow-worm despise that· power of giving light, without which the roving fly might pass her and repass her a thousand times and never light beside her; … the fly must seek another mate, the worm must live and die alone.”

Rosalie, according to Agnes, believes that Agnes would have wished to have been like her. However, although Agnes notes Rosalie’s “heartless vanity,” there is some, perhaps subconscious, envy in her words “I did not – at least, 1 firmly believe 1 did not.”

As with a number of other emotions expressed in the novel, Agnes’s strong feelings need to be rationalized down to something both sensible and constructive. Any envy that Agnes may have felt, therefore, is very much qualified. She goes on to wonder:

“… why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it, and denied to some who would make it a benefit to both themselves and others.”

So Agnes admires her pupil’s beauty and is convinced that she would have used the corresponding attraction better. Yet this is clearly not all she admires about her. Earlier on, while musing on her visits to Nancy Brown and hearing of all the goodwill towards Weston, Agnes reflects on the influence she suffers from the Murray girls:

“And I, as 1 could not make my young companions better, feared exceedingly that they would make me worse —would gradually bring my feelings, habits, capacities to the level of their own, without, however, imparting to me their light-heartedness and cheerful vivacity.”

Agnes goes on to chronicle what she calls the “gross vapours of earth,” and her own supposed debasement which Weston’s presence helps to alleviate as “the morning star in my horizon, to save me from the fear of utter darkness.”

Needless to say, the most crucial point is Rosalie’s “cheerful vivacity.” and this Agnes feels she won’t impart, though it has to be the one, of all Rosalie’s qualities, Agnes would most have liked to feel.

Now we know that Anne Brontë was not, herself, a fluent and easy talker, so we can infer from many of Agnes’s remarks on Rosalie that Anne might have admired those qualities but shrank from seeing them misused in the hands of the wrong people.

Later on, Agnes was to be amazed at Matilda’s easy-flowing discourse, while finding her own conversation with Weston to be difficult. Their strength belongs to a different sort of communion, and unlike a very bitter Lady Ashby, Agnes has no cause to repent her own marriage. Subject to Agnes’s cautionary remarks about her visit to Rosalie at Ashby Park, we feel most sympathy towards this difficult pupil at this point.

Anne’s writing, which leaves so much to the imagination, is more vivid for what it doesn’t say, and we are left to fill in in our minds the sheer vastness of Rosalie’s isolation at Ashby Park.

There is little doubt that Anne is at her most lively when she is involved with Rosalie and there is a sparkle and a vivacity which contrasts markedly with the quieter tone of the rest of the novel. Rosalie’s liveliness, it has to be said, does envelop Agnes as well, as we follow Agnes in looking for Weston both at church and amongst the villagers.

Agnes cannot, for example, avoid glancing towards the door when she is visiting Nancy Brown, and she also wishes not to be seen as the equivalent of a domestic! Perhaps Anne is pointing here towards her leniency towards the flirtatious extravagance of the Robinson girls?

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Shy Agnes, wishing for “cheerful vivacity”

The shy Agnes, like Anne, may in part have wished to share in this “cheerful vivacity,” but even so, it is also true that Agnes is desperate both to guide Rosalie and to teach her an awareness of her faults. It is clear to Agnes — as it was to Anne — that “excessive vanity, like drunkenness, hardens the heart, enslaves the faculties, and perverts the feelings …”

Agnes assumes the mantle of a teacher determined to achieve some good in the world, or, as Anne puts it when prefacing the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

“I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim, and if I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense.”

There are obvious echoes of Edward Weston’s engagement to Agnes here, but, even if Agnes fails to change Rosalie, the fact of the determination is still important in helping us to understand Anne’s real-life efforts concerning the Robinson girls, including some success in helping to prevent a disastrous engagement for one of them.

Perhaps as a final point on Agnes’s involvement with Rosalie Murray — in which Anne most assumes the mantle of a writer’s task of amusing the reader, and the teacher’s mantle of instructing the same. It can be said that Charlotte may have recreated the character of Rosalie in Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette.

It is also possible that George Eliot may have mused over her for the creation of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda. This may well be running with an idea and taking it too far, but, despite the difficulty of proving anything, there are similarities between Gwendolen and Rosalie in their self-confident mastery before marriage and their helpless despair afterward.

 

Agnes’s deep isolation as a governess

The second area of interest in Agnes Grey is the deep isolation of Agnes in both her governess positions. Deprived of kindness, surrounded by brutal hostility at the Bloomfields, and deprived of satisfying friendships at the Murrays, Agnes becomes very isolated.

She observes, rather than participates in, what goes on around her. In describing the friends of Rosalie and Matilda, Agnes observes that they “talked. over me or across, and if their eyes, in speaking, chanced to fall on me, it seemed as if they looked on vacancy …”

Anne builds up an image, here, of the discreet governess lingering slightly behind, always listening, and rarely talking or taken much notice of. The shutting of a carriage door in Agnes’s face by Hatfield would seem to illustrate the thoughtless insensitivity meted out to governesses at the time.

Agnes then says, with emphasis, “I was lonely.” She goes on to detail how she had seen no one:

“… to whom I could open my heart, or freely speak my thoughts with any hope of sympathy, or even comprehension; … whose conversation was calculated to render me better, wiser, happier than before, or who, as far as I could see, could be greatly benefited by mine. My only companions had been unamiable children, and ignorant, wrong-headed girls …”

Excluded from church and meeting Weston there, Agnes seeks refuge in poetry — her own or others’ — and chronicles the loneliness and isolation of her life in “pillars of witness.”

Anne’s handling of Agnes’s isolation is both sensitive and impressive. Her economy of language is as different from Charlotte’s handling of Jane Eyre’s flight from Rochester after their aborted wedding day as it is as powerful and effective.

It is worth comparing the writing of both Anne and Charlotte to illustrate the difference and also the power of both. Here is Agnes, and one may suggest Anne as well, speaking of her inner sense of turmoil, and of her response to her crisis:

“I was a close and resolute dissembler … My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations were witnessed by myself and Heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or .long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry — and often find it too — whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical … but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.”

Agnes’s poetry comforts her, and she manages to deal with her crisis without plunging to the depths of Jane Eyre’s poverty, or Heathcliff’s self-destruction. We may deduce from this that Anne, herself, would have similarly dealt with her feelings for William Weightman.

Agnes’s response is wholly in keeping with Anne’s personality, and is further illustration of the way Anne projects her interests, concerns, and shy voice into her subject matter.

Agnes, as has been shown, avoids the extremity of manifesting her despair. in degradation, and avoids, too, pushing Edward Weston towards a similar abyss of self-destruction. Agnes conceals her agitation by calmly showing her self-sufficiency in going to help in her mother’s school.

 

The role of religion in Agnes Grey

Yet another way that we can listen to Anne’s beating heart comes in her depiction of religion, the third of the main areas of interest in Agnes Grey. Agnes, after her arrival at Horton Lodge, finds herself quickly rejecting Hatfield’s idea of God as a “terrible taskmaster.”

She contrasts this with Weston’s view of God as a “benevolent Father.” Through this contrast, we are made aware of Anne’s views on universal salvation, and on not placing burdens on the backs of people that they can’t bear.

Agnes criticizes Hatfield not only for placing these burdens but also for flying from his pulpit to laugh with the Murray girls over their imposition, and then doing little to alleviate the sufferings of parishioners, like Nancy Brown, in trying to bear them.

His insincere approach seems to show more affinity with the Murray girls’ visits to the sick, dying, and lame, than with Weston’s more benevolent excursions. Here Anne is probably thinking about William Weightman’s visits to the poor of Haworth, but it is through Edward Weston’s perhaps less flamboyant visits that we come closer to Anne’s quiet Christian view of the universal love of God.

Agnes later thanks God for the “many blessings in our path,” and then, in an affirmation of Anne’s own beliefs, she adds:

“We have had trials … but we bear them well together, and endeavour to fortify ourselves and each other against the final separation – that greatest of all afflictions to the survivor; but if we keep in mind the glorious heaven beyond, where both may meet again and sin and sorrow are unknown, surely that too may be borne.”

 

Conclusion

The chief purpose of this essay has been to illustrate how Agnes Grey does leave an impression on the mind, a very powerful and interesting one. The fate of Agnes is important because she comes to assume the mantle of the two roles dearest to Anne Brontë’s heart — namely those of patient teacher, and loving mother.

Therefore, Agnes’s life is of interest to her readers for the light it sheds on the less fulfilled life of her creator, and the novel, as a whole, reveals much of how Anne felt about her own life and about her future.

If Agnes’s tale bends away from the hands of a firm writer into a more imaginary, idealized world this only serves to show how all the Brontë sisters created, through imagination, a greater purpose to their lives.

In seeking that greater and higher purpose, their novels must be taken on their individual merits, and comparing them as competitive works of art can be needlessly destructive of the merits of each as well as distracting.

The achievement of each sister is an insight into the mind of each, and in the case of Agnes Grey, it is certainly a very revealing insight into the thoughts and mind of Anne.

“All true histories contain instruction,” and this is very much how we see Anne’s work, and how she would like to have been judged. She hoped to bring both comfort to other suffering governesses and enlightenment to employers.

In seeking to achieve these aims, Anne noticeably becomes increasingly self-confident and self-assured as Agnes Grey unfolds, and this confidence continues in the more turbulent, though no less richly interesting, Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Agnes Grey is, therefore, an impressive achievement, reflecting both the skill of an assured writer, and that writer’s own particular, and interesting serious thoughts, quiet concerns, and imaginative dreams.

Sources and further reading

Miriam Allott (ed.), The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (1974)Edward Chitham, A Life Of Anne BrontëEdward Chitham, The Poems of Anne Brontë: A New Text and Commentary (Macmillan, 1979)The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (ed.), preface by G. D. Hargreaves, ed.
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1980)Jane Eyre (ed.) Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966)

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Literary Spinsters: The Single Heroine in 19th-Century Literature

Female protagonists in 19th-century novels were customarily used to facilitate the marriage plot. So the single woman, then commonly referred to as a spinster, wasn’t traditionally given heroine status. Here we’ll look at the concept of literary spinsters, and how they presaged the New Woman novels of the early twentieth century.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the single heroine begins to emerge in her own right. Some authors began to challenge the marriage plot and experiment with single female protagonists. Giving the single woman agency in the novel helped alter the traditional narrative trajectory for heroines.

Before the twentieth century, single female protagonists in novels were typically young and socially or financially powerless until “rescued” by marriage.

Energetic and exciting while single, marriage often silenced the heroine’s voice or ended her story.

 

Minor roles in the shadows

There were a variety of stereotypical roles for a very few single female protagonists: she could be depicted as a jealous schemer (Cousin Bette, Honoré de Balzac, 1846) or worse, a dangerous sexual siren (Nana, Emile Zola, 1880).

However, more often she was given minor roles in the shadows of the protagonists. For example, she could have been a foolish garrulous woman like Miss Bates (Emma, Jane Austen, 1815), a tragic jilted-at-the-alter mad woman like Miss Havisham (Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861). The image of Miss Havisham’s burning figure reminds readers of the fate of a woman who cannot keep her man!

Rarely did any single woman at that time hold authority in a narrative. By the early twentieth century, the empowered single female protagonist remained uncommon, but she had become much more accepted, and sometimes reverenced.

 “Redundant women”

So, why were single women largely invalidated while heroines driven by the marriage plot were so adored? One may speculate that the marriage plot is simply a tried-and-true conflict which turns a plot into a best seller, or that women have fallen into a cultural trap which encourages limitation of her own freedoms, or that married, powerless women are a convenience to a patriarchal capitalism.

However, art does not always imitate life and marriage was rarely the key to happiness in as depicted in the nineteenth century. Also, single women who were unable to marry were not necessarily the sad spinsters who readers enjoyed condemning or pitying.

The truth was, in the nineteenth-century there was an “oversupply” of women, so there were not enough men to rescue all the “spinsters.” Jails were full of male prisoners and thousands of single men were drifting to the colonies to improve their lives.

These “redundant women,” a term coined by William Rathbone Greg, were doing more than hiding in parlours, nursing the sick, pining for marriage or tempting the pure.

 

Inspirational real-life “spinsters”

Many of the real “spinsters” of the nineteenth century contrasted markedly with their literary counterparts, but rarely do we meet them in novels:

There were  scientists such as Mary Treat (1830 – 1923), a naturalist and entomologist; Elizabeth Blackwell (1821 –1910), a British-born physician and the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States; and Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910), the English social reformer and founder of modern nursing.

 

Brave authors begin to break rules

Some brave authors in Britain and elsewhere were not entirely bound by literary tradition however, and successfully experimented with heroines who sought more out of life than wedlock. These novels are few but they represent the first possibility in literature of esteeming single women as worthy of close analysis.

Novels such as Anthony Trollop’s Miss Mackenzie (1865), The Story of an African Farm (1883) by Olive Schreiner, and Eyes Like the Sea by Hungary’s Mór Jókai, (1889) were published, often against the demands of their publishers who insisted that unmarried women held no interest to readers and were morally unsound.

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, as the women’s movement began to demand better roles for women in western society, “New Woman” novels began to emerge, in which empowered heroines who threatened the cultural status quo by insisting on a career, sometimes even at the expense of wedlock!

This revolutionary fiction may have obscured earlier novels in the nineteenth century, but it did not render them irrelevant.

 

The Story of an African Farm

One novel that foreshadows the plethora of New Woman novels in the early twentieth century offers a depiction of a controversial single heroine in The Story of an African Farm. 

Lyndall, the protagonist, who determines never to cede her power through marriage, becomes empowered as a heroine, not through inheritance or marriage, but through self-education, developing her own brand of feminist ideology which shapes her decision to remain unmarried.

In this novel, the “conflict” revolves around Lyndall’s rebellion to remain single and the illegitimate pregnancy she insists on experiencing alone. This posed a problem for the novel’s publishers, Chapman and Hall, because “the British public would think it wicked.”

Fortunately, her novel caught the attention of George Meredith, who demonstrated great interest in women’s power in his own novels. He recommended Schreiner’s book for publication to Frederick Chapman.

Chapman interviewed Schreiner, who, in a rage at his suggestion that Lyndall marry in secret, emphatically refused, declaring in a letter, “of course I insisted on saying she was not married to him, it must be so.”

Fortunately for generations of readers, Chapman and Hall accepted Schreiner’s novel without the resolution of marriage. The Story of an African Farm novel is still quite relevant to today’s literature, with some considering it to be the first “New Woman” novel.

Due to the brave pioneering by the authors cited above, heroines in literature and film today enjoy their independence more freely and face a variety of dilemmas needing far more complex resolutions than marriage.

 

The empowered spinster heroine emerges

By the 1920s, readers could enjoy the popular spinster heroine and veteran detective, summoned all over England to solve crimes — Miss Marple, who was created by the best-selling author of all time, Agatha Christie.

Also, there was Mary Poppins, published in 1934, in which the role of the spinster is transformed from that of a humble servant into a flying Nanny, who sees into the hearts and minds of all adults and children, takes charge, and offers magical solutions to families’ problems.

This ingenious character, invented by the Australian-born P.L. Travers, reclaimed the role of the single woman and the carer/servant all in one wonderful narrative.

Contributed by Linda Moctezuma, M.A. Linda writes: “I am an Australian teacher at a New South Wales Government High School teaching English as a Second Language to newly arrived migrant, international and refugee students in Sydney. Our lucky students in NSW receive a specialized year of intensive English to prepare them for their High School studies.

I love my work, however, my true passion is literature. I completed a Masters by Research thesis in 2019 called “The Singularity of the Single Heroine in the Nineteenth Century Novel” at Sydney University. I had previously completed a Masters by Coursework at The University of NSW in 1991, where my thesis was entitled “The Portrayal of Female ‘Madness’ in the Novel.”

I am hoping to publish a more extensive study in the future which traces the depictions of single women throughout the ages, and within different cultures.”

References

Why Are Women Redundant? by William Rathbone Greg (London: N. Trübner and Co, 1869)“The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” North American Review (March 1894)Olive Schreiner by Ruth First and Ann Scott (1989)

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Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann (1927)

The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall is often cited as the first published lesbian novel written in English, but Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann (1927) preceded it by a year.

As in Hall’s novel there is no explicit lesbianism but a strongly implied relationship between two girls at college. This was noted by outraged critics of the time, one of whom wrote an article in the London Evening Standard titled “The Perils of Youth,” addressing what he presumed to be the degenerate readers of Lehman’s novel:

“To all these sex-ridden young men and women I would counsel, as the best remedy for their troubles, silence and self-control. And I would have them remember that all their discussions will never carry them back beyond the plain unvarnished statement of Genesis, ‘Male and female created He them.’”

This synopsis of Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid 20th-Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

 

A bittersweet novel of manners

It’s hard to imagine now why critics were so incensed by Dusty Answer. It is a very gentle, bittersweet novel of the manners of the upper-middle-class England of its time, as well as being a bildungsroman following Judith’s progress through adolescence.

Like her author, Judith, the heroine of Dusty Answer, has been brought up in privilege and privately educated. The first part of the book is a reminiscence of her childhood and her relationship with the cousins who lived next door to her family.

By the end of the book she will have had sex – albeit, as it were, offstage – with one of the boys and offered herself – albeit half-heartedly – to the other two. But her main passion is a young woman she meets when she goes to college.

For the first time in her life she is meeting people outside her immediate circle and has a room of her own at last. She is on the way to her coming of age, though she finds that the price of freedom is a separation from the certainties of childhood:

“She sat on a hard chair and said to herself: Independence at last. This is Life. Life at last is beginning; but rather because it seemed so much more like a painful death than because she believed it.”

Judith is at first out of her depth and lonely in this unfamiliar environment; one of her colleagues asks her if there is anyone she knows from her school. “I’ve never been to school. This is the first time I’ve ever been away from home,” she says.

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Girls in Bloom is available on Amazon US and Amazon UK
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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Meeting and becoming obsessed with Jennifer

But then she meets Jennifer who, as it turns out, will be the love of her life, even though she loses her in the end. There is never any description of the physical relationship between the two women, though it is strongly implied.

At first she does not know the true nature of her feelings, does not dare to confide in Jennifer. Ironically, they first become close over her feelings for Roddy, one of her former neighbors, whom, pre- and post-Jennifer she also thinks is the love of her life and with whom she will make love; her first and only time with a man in the book.

Judith becomes obsessed with Jennifer. “Always Jennifer. It was impossible to drink up enough of her; and a day without her was a day with the light gone.”

Lehmann’s detached authorial voice occasionally shifts into second person to get us closer to Judith: “Was it that people had the day and the night in them, mixed in varying quantities? Jennifer had the strength of day, and you the strength of night. By day, your little glow was merged in her radiance; but the night was stronger, and overcame her.”

The two girls spend as much time as possible together, going swimming together naked; Judith admires Jennifer as if she were a Greek statue. They read and study together, talking with “excitement, with anxiety, as if tomorrow might part them and leave them for ever burdened with the weight of all they had had to tell each other.”

Jennifer becomes “the part of you which you never had been able to untie and set free, the part that wanted to dance and run and sing, taking strong drafts of wind and sunlight … And yet was checked by a voice that said doubtfully that there were dark ideas behind it all, tangling the web; and turned you inward to grope among the roots of thought and feeling for the threads.”

Of course. this intensity can’t last, and it doesn’t. By the third year, “Jennifer was no longer the same. Somewhere she had turned aside without a word, and set her face to a new road. She did not want to be followed. She had given Judith the slip, in the dark.”

It turns out that there is another woman in Jennifer’s life: the older, more sophisticated and very butch Geraldine, “so mature and well-dressed; if there was to be a fight, what chance was there for a thin young student in a woolen jumper?” Judith has lost Jennifer but has become almost reconciled; “how ridiculous, how sad to have made one person into all poetry!”

After Jennifer, “there was nothing in life save work,’ as Judith prepares for her exams. “Three hours. It was over. You could not remember what you have written; but you had never felt more firm and sure of mind. Three hours nearer to life.”

 

Leaving college life; reconnecting with Roddy

But leaving college these is a great hole in this life, “a great idleness under whose burden you felt lost and oppressed.”

Judith thinks only of the “single tremendous calamitous significance of Jennifer, how since her going it had been like the muddy bed of the lake whose waters had been sapped day after day in a long drought.”

As she leaves the college building for the last time, she leaves behind no real friends: her absorption in Jennifer has prevented her from coming close to anyone else.

Judith returns home and immediately goes off with her society mother – there is no father – to the south of France, traveling around with her, staying in good hotels, dressing elegantly and socializing with equally shallow socialites. But then she meets Roddy again.

It seems as though Roddy has taken Judith’s virginity – or she has given it to him – under the willow trees; it is only implied here but she confirms it later on. Roddy does not love her and does not even want to see her after the incident but still she does not regret it.

This is undoubtedly a coming of age moment for her, though not the final one. On the rebound, and only to hurt Roddy, she agrees to marry Martin, another of her childhood neighbors; he is very sweet and charming to her and loves her completely but she cannot really see him as anything other than a childhood friend.

Judith quickly relents and tells Martin she cannot marry him; he is devastated and subsequently dies in a boating accident – it is not clear whether or not he has killed himself. Judith continues to travel with her mother and live a shallow life in her mother’s shallow international society.

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Rosamond Lehmann
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Enter Julian; coming of age

While traveling, she meets Julian, the third of the cousins who used to live next door to her; he is now a world-weary, experienced and cynical playboy who offers to make her his mistress, though he makes it clear he is not interested in marriage.

“Julian must save her this time: surely his wit and wisdom, surely the unknown world of sexual, emotional and intellectual experience which he held so temptingly, just out of reach – surely these would, in time, heap an abiding mound upon the past.”

But following the news of Roddy’s death, before she has chance to sleep with him, she changes her mind, implying to him that she is still a virgin.

“Julian – I couldn’t give you – what you wanted. I couldn’t! It’s such a step – you don’t realise – for a woman. She can’t ever go back – afterwards, and be safe in the world. And she might want to.”

She does let him kiss her, however and thinks: “Now I’ve been kissed by all three of them.” Julian later writes Judith a very long letter asking if they can still be friends.

“What a year this has been, and how we grow up!” she answers him. “I am all uprooted, and don’t know what I shall do. I must begin to make plans. I suppose I shall never emerge from obscurity in any way. I used to think it a certainty that I should … Enchantment has vanished from the world. Perhaps it will never come back, save in memory. Perhaps I shared with you the last gleam I shall have of it.”

Jennifer also writes to her; she is still with Geraldine and has cut her hair short in sympathy with her and as a sign of her sexuality.

Jennifer agrees to meet Judith at the cafe in Cambridge that they used to go to together; Judith goes but Jennifer does not show up. Judith goes home, perhaps for the last time, finally come of age.

     She was rid at last of the weakness, the futile obsession of dependence on other people. She had nobody now except herself, and that was best.
     This was to be happy – this emptiness, this light coloured state, this no-thought and no-feeling.
     She was a person who is so past made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded.
     Soon she must begin to think: What next?
     But not quite yet.

 

More about Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann Reader discussion on Goodreads 1927 review in The Atlantic Review on Heavenali Rosamond Lehmann, Literary Star (Paris Reviews)

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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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Sigrid Undset, Norwegian Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist

Sigrid Undset (Norwegian, May 20, 1882 – June 10, 1945) was the author of thirteen novels that have been translated into nearly all major languages. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 for “her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages.”

Her medieval epics Kristin Lavransdatter and Olav Audunsson (also known as The Master of Hestviken) have been recently reprinted and freshly translated by scholar Tiina Nunnally.

 

Early life and writings

Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark and her family moved to Norway when she was a toddler. Her devoted parents were intellectuals. Her father was an esteemed archaeologist, and her talented mother often illustrated his publications.

Undset’s youthful imagination was enriched by frequent visits to the Oslo Museum and her father’s familiarity with Norwegian history and folklore. Sadly, her father died when she was just eleven.

At age nineteen, Undset wrote of her longing to write: “Someone can have so much love for art and such understanding of what art is that in the morning she burns what she feverishly wrote the night before because she hasn’t been able to blow the breath of life into the people who haunt her heart.”

Undset didn’t wish to pursue a teaching career, as she considered her own behavior like that “of a small animal.” Instead, she worked in an office for ten years. She published her first book when she was twenty-five, then traveled to Germany and Italy on a scholarship. Her early novels were contemporary and didn’t receive the international acclaim of her later epics.

Gunnar’s Daughter (1909) is a gem among her early work; set in Norway as the Viking Age is fading and Christianity gains a foothold, the novel’s medieval setting and its morally complicated, strong-willed heroine is a preview of her later masterpieces.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Marriage and conversion

In 1912, at the age of thirty, Undset married the artist Anders Castus Svarstad. Thirteen years her senior, his first marriage and contentious divorce undoubtedly influenced the character of Erlend, the profligate lover of the eponymous heroine of her Kristin Lavransdatter novels.

Undset and her husband had three children, one of whom had mental disabilities; her husband had another disabled child from his first marriage. Their marriage crumbled and was annulled in 1927.

Though raised by atheist parents, Undset was drawn to Catholicism and converted in 1924, at a time when Catholics were still regarded with great suspicion. Her new faith redirected her writing, and the daily conflict between right and wrong choices, and the influence of religion on history, marriage, and sexuality would be recurrent themes in her subsequent novels.

Christianity arrived quite late to Norway and Undset often explored the clash between organized religion and paganistic practices in her medieval novels. (Undset’s biography of St. Catherine of Siena would be published posthumously in 1951, praised for its extensive use of primary sources and focus on the saint’s humanity.)

Despite Undset’s adoption of a conservative faith and her distrust of the growing women’s movement she was no prig. She continued writing multifaceted female characters who committed acts of violence and revenge and never shied away from depicting religious hypocrisy.

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Kristin Lavransdatter

Undset’s later works are renowned for their scope and historical detail. Perhaps unusual for such a religious writer, she wrote with a lack of moralism and with empathy about her flawed characters; she painted human frailty with a compassionate brush. Her masterworks are arguably The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross, which form her medieval Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (1920 – 22).

Kristin is born into aristocratic privilege, the apple of her virtuous father’s eye. Despite being a strong-willed girl, she possesses deep reservoirs of loyalty and love. Kristin has a close bond with Brother Edvin, who hopes the sensitive maiden will enter the church.

She is betrothed to a dull neighbor and then nearly raped by a jealous childhood friend. After recovering from the attack and subsequent gossip, she is seduced by Erlend Nikulausson.

He is an older, devastatingly alluring knight who has been excommunicated by the church and lives with a vengeful mistress. Kristin’s defiance of her father by pursuing marriage with Erlend sets off a series of consequences that reverberates over decades and across three novels.

The Kristin Lavransdatter saga is a marvelous examination of what has changed and remained the same in the lives of women since the Middle Ages.

The novels vividly depict patriarchy, assault, sexism, and women’s struggle for autonomy and survival. Kristin is a woman with an extraordinarily complex inner life and character: she is both reckless and unselfish, ruthless and tender-hearted, lustful and pious.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Nobel Prize and exile

In 1928, based on the strength of Kristin Lavransdatter and the tetralogy Olav Audunsson (1925 – 1927), Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, only the third woman to be granted the honor. She humbly accepted it, promptly donated all the prize money to charity, then became a lay Dominican—a member of the Catholic Order of Preachers.

Undset quietly continued writing, returning to contemporary novels. Then, the Nazis invaded Norway in April, 1940. Due to her intellectualism and religious convictions, Undset despised the Nazis. Now in her fifties, she became involved with Norway’s underground movement.

After two of her children died, she fled Norway, staying briefly in Sweden. She spent the remainder of the war years in the United States, writing and touring to raise awareness of the Nazi occupation of her home country.

Undset lent her fame to publicly and vociferously protest the murder of a Danish Lutheran pastor and playwright Kaj Munk, who was executed by the Nazis. During the war Undset also befriended the Florida-based American author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (author of The Yearling) and joyfully returned to Norway after the Allied victory and five years in exile.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Later life and legacy of Sigrid Undset

After her return, Undset received the Grand Cross of St. Olav for her writing and patriotism, particularly her support of resistance against the Nazis; the honor meant she was appointed to Norway’s order of knights. Restored to her beloved home in Lillehammer, Undset never wrote again and quietly passed away at the age of sixty-seven.

Tiina Nunnally, Undset’s recent translator, praises her books for being written “in a straightforward, almost plain style, yet she can be quite lyrical, especially in her descriptions of nature.”

Her epics are noteworthy for the wide array of flawed, vivid characters and the plethora of accurately rendered medieval settings. Gunnar’s Daughter, Olav Audunsson, and Kristin Lavransdatter are emotional and unforgettable journeys that will transport the reader to the Middle Ages.

Today, Sigrid Undset’s Home is a museum in Lillehammer, where visitors can get tours of this notable author’s house and gardens.

Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, who graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and loves periodicals, history, and writing.

More about Sigrid Undset

Further Reading and Sources

Inside the Gate: Sigrid Undset’s Life at Bjerkebæk by Nan Bentzen Skille,
translated by Tiina Nunnally (2018)Literary Landscapes, edited by John Sutherland (2018) Biographical page on the Nobel Prize website Sigrid Undset website

Selected Novels (in English translation)

Marta Oulie (1907)Gunnar’s Daughter (1909)Jenny (1911)Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22) 
     The Wreath
     The Wife
     The Cross The Master of Hestviken (1925-27; translated and republished as Olav Audunsson 2020 – 2023)
    The Axe (republished as I. Vow)
    The Snake Pit (II. Providence)
    In the Wilderness (III. Crossroads)
    The Son Avenger (IV. Winter)The Wild Orchid (1931)Ida Elisabeth (1933)Catherine of Siena (1951)

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Olive Schreiner, Author of The Story of an African Farm

Olive Schreiner (March 24, 1855 – December 11, 1920) was a South African author and activist best known for her debut novel The Story of an African Farm, first published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Iron. It later appeared in 1891, credited to the author’s real name.

The Story of an African Farm dealt with themes like feminism, family life, and Victorian culture. Olive drew from personal experience, having worked as a governess on several South African farms. The book became notable (and controversial) for rejecting traditional values and was an immediate bestseller.

She was also a prolific letter-writer, corresponding with many great minds like Emily Hobhouse. Olive remained involved in many political and social causes of the time, including the right to vote for South African women.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Early life, youth, and education

Olive Schreiner was born in Wittebergen, Eastern Cape, South Africa. She was one of twelve children born to missionary parents Gottlob and Rebecca Schreiner.

Olive credited the death of her sister, Helen, as her first revelation. She questioned values and doctrines at nine, largely as the result of her sister’s death.

Olive lived with one of her brothers, a headmaster in Cradock, from 1867. After becoming dissatisfied with Cradock, she worked as a governess for several Cape households. This period served as part of the inspiration for The Story of an African Farm.

For most of her life, Olive was disillusioned with traditional Victorian culture. Her critical, anti-establishment views meant she clashed with many employers.

Olive traveled to Southampton, England, to pursue medical studies in 1881. She was unable to continue these studies, partially due to worsening respiratory health. The sudden change led her to pursue being a writer.

Her romances were mostly brief: she refused a proposal from Bryan Donkin, her doctor. Another brief engagement before this period ended for unknown reasons.

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The Story of an African Farm (1883)

Olive Schreiner’s first novel has remained her best known. The description from the 2008 reprint from Oxford University Press:

“Lyndall, Schreiner’s articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation.

Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship.

Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner’s daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man.

A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa’s high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society’s greatest fears — the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women’s social and political independence.”

Writing as “Ralph Iron” in the Preface to the first edition, she wrote:

“Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that each character is duly marshaled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing.

There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return.

When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing.

Life may be painted according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.”

 

Return to South Africa & Writings

Olive returned to Southern Africa in 1889. She continued writing about South Africa, becoming involved as an activist for local causes (her posthumous work, Thoughts on South Africa (1923) contains some of the essays from this time).

Her second novel, Dreams, was published in 1890. This collection of short stories deals with dreams from her time in South Africa. Among the stories collected are “The Lost Joy,” “The Hunter,” and “In a Far-Off World.”

In 1891, the second edition of The Story of an African Farm appeared with her real name. Dream Life and Real Life followed in 1893.

Olive corresponded with others, including Emily Hobhouse and Havelock Ellis. More than 5,000 letters between Schreiner and others are collected at Olive Schreiner Letters Online.

Human rights activism was also part of her life’s work. She was conflicted with politician Cecil John Rhodes over laws dictating racially-based punishment under his rule. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) was a harsh criticism of Rhodes and the time’s racial policies.

She married Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner in 1894, co-authoring The Political Situation in Cape Colony (1895) with her new husband. Their marriage faced difficulty, including a lawsuit against Cronwright-Schreiner claiming then-£1,000 in libel damages. Of Samuel, she wrote: “He will always be in trouble.” 

Olive continued as a writer and activist despite ill health. She became vice-president of the Women’s Enfranchisement League in the Cape in 1907. The Women’s Enfranchisement Act was only introduced in 1930, allowing women over twenty-one to vote and join office.

Women and Labour (1911) was her next work, apparently published after an earlier manuscript was destroyed during the looting of her home by British soldiers.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Olive Schreiner’s last years and legacy

With her health still declining, she returned to England for treatment in 1913. World War I (starting in 1914) prevented her immediate return to South Africa.

She finally returned to South Africa in 1920 and died from chronic respiratory disease in Wynberg the same year. Her last work, The Dawn of Civilisation, was published after her death.

Olive was originally buried in Kimberley, South Africa. Her gravesite was later moved to Cradock in 1921, when Cronwright-Schreiner returned to Southern Africa.

Her posthumous legacy includes a residence at Rhodes University named in her honor. The Oliver Schreiner Prize has also existed since 1961, given to works of exceptional poetry, prose, or drama.

The Story of an African Farm was adapted to film in 2004, though it was generally not favorably reviewed.

Today, Olive Schreiner is considered one of the most influential South African writers of the 19th century.

Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo, and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

More about Olive Schreiner

On this site

10 Unforgettable Works by South African Women Authors

Major Works

The Story of an African Farm (1883)Dreams (1890)Dream Life and Real Life (1893)The Political Situation in Cape Colony (1895) with Samuel Cronwright-SchreinerThoughts on South Africa (1923)

More Information and sources

SA History: Olive Schreiner Encyclopedia Britannica The Olive Schreiner Prize Olive Schreiner Letters Online Oxford Bibliographies

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George Eliot: Writing as Only a Woman Could

The probing Victorian novels of George Eliot (1819 – 1880; nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans) sealed her reputation as one of the greats of English literature. The insightful essay following argues that (masculine pen name notwithstanding) George Eliot wrote as a woman, as only a woman could, without any outlook that could be construed as a man’s.

George Eliot drew her characters with great compassion. Her politically and socially driven stories were populated with characters drawn with great psychological depth whether they were free thinkers, eccentrics, intellectuals, or complex women straining against societal strictures.

Eliot never looked down on her characters, whatever social class they belonged to, and she was especially compassionate to the women in her stories. From Adam Bede (1859) her first novel, through Daniel Deronda (1876), her last, her female characters were imagined fully formed, with dreams and desires of their own.

The following essay is a portion of the entry on George Eliot in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica by Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie:

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George Sand neither felt, nor wrote, nor thought as a man

No right estimate of George Eliot, whether as a woman, an artist or a philosopher, can be formed without a steady recollection of her infinite capacity for mental suffering, and her need of human support. The statement that there is no sex in genius, is on the face of it, absurd.

George Sand, certainly the most independent and dazzling of all women authors, neither felt, nor wrote, nor thought as a man. Saint Teresa, another great writer on a totally different plane, was pre-eminently feminine in every word and idea.

George Eliot, less reckless, less romantic than the Frenchwoman, less spiritual than the Spanish saint, was more masculine in style than either; but her outlook was not, for a moment, the man’s outlook; her sincerity, with its odd reserves, was not quite the same as a man’s sincerity, nor was her humor that genial, broad, unequivocal humor which is peculiarly virile.

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More about George Eliot
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Female authors who influenced George Eliot

Hers approximated, curiously enough, to the satire of Jane Austen both for its irony and its application to little everyday affairs. Men’s humor, in its classic manifestations, is on the heroic rather than on the average scale: it is for the uncommon situations, not for the daily tea-table.

Her method of attacking a subject shows the influence of Jane Austen, especially in parts of Middlemarch; one can detect also the stronger influence of Mrs. Gaskell, of Charlotte Brontë, and of Miss Edgeworth.

It was, however, but an influence, and no more than a man writer, anxious to acquire a knowledge of the feminine point of view, might have absorbed from a study of these women novelists.

 George Eliot suffered with her characters

One often hears that she is not artistic; that her characterization is less distinct than Jane Austen’s; that she tells more than should be known of her heroes and heroines. But it should be remembered that Jane Austen dealt with familiar domestic types, whereas George Eliot excelled in the presentation of extraordinary souls.

One woman drew members of polite society with correct notions, while the other woman depicted social rebels with ideas and ideals. In every one of George Eliot’s books, the protagonists, tortured by dreams of perfection, are in revolt against the prudent compromises of the worldly.

All through her stories, one hears the clash of “the heroic for earth too high,” and the desperate philosophy, disguised it is true, of Omar Khayyam. In her day, Epicureanism had not reached the life of the people, nor passed into the education of the mob. Few dared to confess that the pursuit of pleasure, whether real or imagined, was the aim of mankind.

The charm of Jane Austen is the charm of the untroubled and well-to-do materialist, who sees in a rich marriage, a comfortable house, carriages and an assured income the best to strive for; and in a fickle lover of either sex or the loss of money the severest calamities which can befall the human spirit.

Jane Austen despised the greater number of her characters: George Eliot suffered with each of hers. Here, perhaps, we find the reason why she is accused of being inartistic. She could not be impersonal.

Again, George Eliot was a little scornful to those of both sexes who had neither special missions nor the consciousness of this deprivation. Men are seldom in favor of missions in any field.

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George Eliot’s Fictional Women
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A pen free from cynicism, bitterness, and pride

She demanded, too strenuously from the very beginning, an aim, more or less altruistic, from every individual; and as she advanced in life this claim became the more imperative, till at last it overpowered her art, and transformed a great delineator of humanity into an eloquent observer with far too many personal prejudices.

But she was altogether free from cynicism, bitterness, or the least tendency to pride of intellect. She suffered from bodily weakness the greater part of her life, and, but for an extraordinary mental health — inherited from the fine yeoman stock from which she sprang—it is impossible that she could have retained, at all times, so sane a view of human conduct, or been the least sentimental among women writers of the first rank—the one wholly without morbidity in any disguise.

The accumulation of mere book knowledge, as opposed to the friction of a life spent among all sorts and conditions of men, drove George Eliot at last to write as a specialist for specialists: joy was lost in the consuming desire for strict accuracy: her genius became more and more speculative, less and less emotional.

The highly trained brain suppressed the impulsive heart,—the heart described with such candor and pathos as Maggie Tulliver’s in The Mill on the Floss. For this reason—chiefly because philosophy is popularly associated with inactive depression, whereas human nature is held to be eternally exhilarating—her later works have not received so much praise as her earlier productions.

But one has only to compare Romola or Daniel Deronda with the compositions of any author except herself to realize the greatness of her designs, and the astonishing gifts brought to their final accomplishment.

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Elsa Morante, author of Arturo’s Island

Before the advent of the mysterious, best-selling author Elena Ferrante there was the provocative Italian novelist and short story writer Elsa Morante (August 18, 1912 – November 25, 1985).

Morante portrayed life’s pain and perils, but her novels also detail the power of imagination that can transport us from cruel reality. Her four novels span the entire twentieth century and illuminate the lives and inner worlds of men, women, and children.

All of her novels detail the main character’s coming of age and their fear of leaving behind the safety of childhood for the potential dangers of adulthood, and the prospect of death. Morante acknowledged the dark, overarching theme of her novels:

“The transition from fantasy to consciousness (from youth to maturity) is a tragic and fundamental experience for everyone. For me that experience came early and took the form of war: my encounter with maturity was premature and hit me with devastating force.”

 

Early Life

Morante began and ended her life in the culturally and historically rich city of Rome, Italy. Born in obscurity, she would leave an indelible mark on the capital city’s literary heritage. Her early life was unhappy; her parents’ marriage was deeply troubled and she later found out that her biological father was a family friend.

By the age of five, Morante was writing poems and soon began creating plays and children’s stories that were extraordinarily inventive. She was supported in her early literary efforts by her wealthy godmother and a headmistress that proclaimed her “a genius.”

At the age of eighteen, she left her traumatic home environment, determined to support herself as a writer. Growing up in poverty in pre-war Rome, Morante never attended university. Instead, she continued to educate herself for the rest of her life and later befriended Rome’s leading intellectuals.

Her eventual personal and professional triumphs are even more remarkable since, like the esteemed Maya Angelou, Morante frequently supported herself as a sex worker to survive.

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Alberto Moravia and Elsa in the 1940s
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Marriage to Alberto Moravia

In 1957, at the age of twenty-five, Morante met fellow writer Alberto Moravia, who was ten years her senior. Struggling with ill health, he was slowly building a literary reputation.

He described Morante, his future wife, as “an angel fallen from heaven into the practical hell of daily living. But an angel armed with a pen.” He also described her as a person who “lived in the exceptional and not in the normal.” They married in 1941 and remained married for twenty-one years.

Lily Tuck, Morante’s biographer, described the couple’s love as “often expressed in an ambivalent, disingenuous, and belligerent fashion.” Although the fraught union eventually ended in divorce, the pair are still celebrated as Italy’s most famous literary couple.

Both Morante and Moravia were half-Jewish and were forced into hiding during World War II. Their harrowing experiences inspired works by each of them: Moravia’s Two Women (the basis of the Oscar-winning film starring Sophia Loren), and History (La Storia) which is being adapted into an eight-part miniseries.

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Elsa and her beloved cats
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Personality and writing habits

A known lover of cats, she was noted for her piercing, cat-like gaze, along with her style and singular beauty. Her personality was as unusual and compelling as her writing. She was emotionally volatile and could dazzle and repel those who were drawn to her in equal measure. Her biographer Lily Tuck notes that Morante possessed “a sharp and sensitive mind.”

Tuck makes special notes of her unique writing habits:

“Morante always wrote in longhand in large, black, unlined notebooks … she wrote on every other page, leaving the intervening pages blank for note and corrections … She used different colored pens and she often doodled or drew pictures of cats and stars on the side of the page.”

All her life, Morante drew eccentric people to her and was known for her loyalty and generosity. She was close friends with the controversial filmmaker and polymath and was broken-hearted by his murder, which has yet to be solved.

Perhaps influenced by her circle of friends and unconventional upbringing, she populated her novels with unconventional characters and societal outcasts. Each of her novels is highly original and utterly lacking in sentimentality.

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Major works

Morante’s first novel was House of Liars (1948) which has been recently reprinted by the New York Review of Books and retitled Lies and Sorcery. A sprawling, multi-generational saga inspired by Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust, the plot is resolutely women-centric.

History (1974), despite its massive length and unusual structure, was one of the top international bestsellers of the 1970s, regarded as an extraordinary depiction of World War II. The plot of her final novel, Aracoeli (1982), is unusual in its psychological exploration of a son and his disturbed elderly mother.

Arturo’s Island (L’isolo di Arturo) is arguably Morante’s most popular novel, exquisitely translated most recently by Ann Goldstein, known for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s novels.

When first published in 1957, the novel ran counter to the contemporary literary trend of bleak neo-realism, but the tenderly-wrought, sun-drenched coming-of-age story immediately won over critics and audiences alike.

That year Morante won Italy’s most coveted literary award, the Strega Prize. Other famous winners include Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard and Umberto Eco‘s The Name of the Rose. Arturo’s Island was adapted as a film in 1962.

 

Later life and death

After a slow and painful decline due to hydroencephalitis, Morante passed away on November 25, 1985 at the age of seventy-three. A newspaper headline announcing her death read “GOOD-BYE ELSA OF A THOUSAND SPELLS.”

Her friend Cesare Garboli declared that “There does not exist in all of Italian literature a writer who is more loved and hated, more read and more ignored, than Morante.” Over time, her reputation has steadily grown while Moravia’s has declined.

Morante acknowledged that she was a deeply wounded, complicated, and unpredictable woman, and in her writing she set out to create a form of femininity that resisted conventional standards. Her female characters are anguished, passionate, and determined to survive and thrive in a man’s world. All her life Morante defied the strictures of Fascism and the crushing patriarchy of her time.

Morante’s novels and short stories have much to offer the reader, particularly for their originality and mythical quality. Tuck writes: “She was a passionate, deeply spiritual person who despised authority under any form … She was a serious artist who wanted, through her work, to change the world, even as she knew quite well that it was impossible.”

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Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, who graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and she loves periodicals, history, and writing.

More about Elsa Morante

Further reading and sources

Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily TuckThe Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages by Carmela CiuaruLiterary Landscapes, edited by John Sutherland Jewish Women’s Archive

Novels

Diario 1938 (1938)Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) – House of Liars, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1951;
and as Lies and Sorcery, translated by Jenny McPhee, 2023L’isola di Arturo (1957) – Arturo’s Island, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1959;
translated by Ann Goldstein, 2019La storia (1974) – History: A Novel, translated by William Weaver, 1977Aracoeli (1982) – Aracoeli, translated by William Weaver, 1984

Short story collections

Il gioco segreto (1941)Le straordinarie avventure di Caterì dalla Trecciolina (1942)Lo scialle andaluso (1963)Racconti dimenticati (1937–1947)Aneddoti infantili (1939–1940)

The post Elsa Morante, author of Arturo’s Island appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Alliance of Sisters: The Complex Relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell collaborated artistically, influenced each other’s work, shared friends, and were central figures in the Bloomsbury Group. They were also at the heart of one another’s family stories.

Their relationship was a deep and unusual one: powerful, interdependent, with unsettling periods of jealousy and hostility, yet characterized by mutual support and devotion throughout their lives.  Virginia was one of the most influential English authors of the twentieth century; Vanessa was a noted painter.

The sisters lived close to one another until Virginia’s death in 1941. Infusing both her writing and her life, it was the relationship that influenced Virginia more than any other except that with her husband, Leonard Woolf.

Photo above right, Virginia and Vanessa Bell playing cricket in 1894 (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

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Virginia and her mother, Julia Stephen, 1884
(photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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Childhood in Hyde Park Gate

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen, and her older sister Vanessa Bell (1879 – 1961), born Vanessa Stephen, grew up in Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London.

Virginia, in later life, would often recall memory in “scenes,” though she couldn’t do so with Vanessa: “My relation with Vanessa,” she wrote, “has been too deep for “scenes.”

One exception, however, was her first memory of her older sister, in which she recalled meeting Vanessa under the nursery table in the family home. Vanessa asked her, “Have black cats got tails?” to which Virginia replied, “‘NO,’ and was proud because she had asked me a question. Then we roamed off again into that vast space.”

As small children, she and Vanessa slept and bathed together. Vanessa, already the “little mother” though she was only three years older than Virginia, rubbed her with scented creams and put her to bed.

The closeness of their childhood relationship was perhaps inevitable. Their father, Leslie Stephen, was an intellectual and a voracious reader and writer. He had little time for children, especially for Vanessa, who showed scant interest in literature. Their mother, Julia Stephen, was worn thin by the demands of both her family and philanthropic work; the young sisters very rarely had time alone with her.

Virginia and Vanessa had two brothers, two half-brothers, and a half-sister and sisters (it was a second marriage for both parents). A constant atmosphere of rivalry discouraged any real closeness. The exception was their brother Thoby, with whom both sisters shared an affectionate bond.

They also both adored St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent thirteen summers until Julia’s untimely death in 1895, and the memories of it would both enchant and haunt them for years afterward.

It was during these nursery years — or so both sisters later claimed — that they each decided what they were going to be: Virginia would be the writer, Vanessa the painter. Vanessa later wrote, “It was a lucky arrangement, for it meant we went our own ways and one source of jealousy at any rate was absent.”

Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t always true. There was often a slight sense of jealous longing between the sisters, particularly from Vanessa, who felt as if she came off unfavorably compared to her sister.

She wrote to Virginia in 1908 that she felt “painfully incompetent to write letters and becoming more & more so as I see the growing strength of the exquisite literary atmosphere distilled by you,” while Virginia acknowledged that “Nessa has all that I should like to have.”

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“An alliance so knit together”

In the years following their mother’s death, both sisters were subject to sexual abuse by their half-brother George Duckworth. Virginia was relatively open about the damage it caused, both in her diary and in letters to friends, whereas Vanessa never spoke of it.

Later Virginia would blame her second and most serious breakdown (in 1904) on the family that was “tangled and matted with emotion” and maintained that her only savior was her sister: “Where should I have been if it hadn’t been for you, when Hyde Park Gate was at its worst?”

During “the worst,” Virginia and Vanessa “had an alliance that was so knit together that everything … was seen from the same angle; and took its shape from our own vantage point.”

Already preoccupied with art and literature, neither sister had much time for the social efforts that they had to make in the stifling upper-middle classes to which the Stephens belonged, and they resented the traditional expectations that were placed upon them.

They shared a firm belief that they could one day live in a different world, where they would be free to create a life of books and painting and friendship, without the constraints of the lingering Victorian-era expectations which were thrust upon them at Hyde Park Gate. 

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Vanessa in 1902 (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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“His life would have entirely ended mine”

Their father’s illness and death in February 1904 caused a divergence between them that Virginia felt especially strongly. She had always been closer to their father than Vanessa, enjoying a rapport with him that Vanessa never had. He appreciated her intellect and talents for reading and writing (despite his Victorian belief that women were meant only for the home), whereas he never understood Vanessa’s passion for painting and art. 

It was largely Vanessa who had taken on the burden of his emotional demands and of helping to run the household after their mother’s death. When he died, Vanessa felt an unequivocal relief that Virginia couldn’t share. While Vanessa made almost immediate plans to clear out the family home and move house, to travel and to paint, Virginia was much less able to simply walk away. 

It was the first time in her life that she felt she couldn’t confide in Vanessa. Instead, she confided some of her feelings to a family friend, Violet Dickinson: “You can’t think what a relief it is to have someone — that is you, because there isn’t anyone else to talk to.” 

Later, in her 1928 diary, Virginia revisited some of the turmoil she had felt and the tangled feelings that emerged from this time, acknowledging that, “His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books — inconceivable.”

She joined Vanessa in traveling — first to Italy, and then to Venice and France, returning home via Paris — but didn’t enjoy the experience. She found it noisy and irritating, and resented being unable to speak the language, feelings that were no doubt exacerbated by Vanessa’s exuberant joy at the art, sights, and newfound freedom. 

By May, when they returned to London, Virginia was experiencing one of the worst periods of mental breakdown she would ever suffer. Over the next three months, she became suicidal, violent, and stubborn beyond reason, and suffered from hallucinations. The bulk of her care, outside of the nurses that became necessary, fell to Vanessa.

At this time, Vanessa was also arranging a move from Hyde Park Gate to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and when Virginia was deemed well enough, she was relieved to join her sister — along with their brother Thoby and his friends from Cambridge — in this new life that seemed so far removed from the old. 

 

Early days of Bloomsbury; inevitability of marriage

In spring 1905 the sisters established regular “Thursday evenings,” on which Thoby’s friends from Cambridge were invited to drop in informally after dinner. This, Virginia believed, was the seed of the Bloomsbury group.

It made a refreshing change in that the intellectual conversation not only included both her and Vanessa, but placed them at the heart of it. The group included their younger brother Adrian, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and Roger Fry.

In these early years of freedom, the two sisters presented such a unified front that when Leonard Woolf wrote in his autobiography of first meeting them together, he couldn’t help referring to the two of them as one entity:

“It was almost impossible for a man not to fall in love with them, and I think that I did at once.” Much later, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth, Virginia would write, “He [Leonard] saw me it is true; and thought me an odd fish; and went off the next day to Ceylon, with a vague romance about us both.”

Indeed, it was Vanessa that Leonard first hoped to marry, but on hearing that Clive Bell had asked her and been accepted, Leonard switched his attention to Virginia instead. Similarly, Clive Bell had initially found himself drawn more to Virginia than to Vanessa.

With this new life, they had created a quasi-family. At the center of this group of engaging friends, Vanessa was like the doting mother and Virginia was the brilliant child. 

Virginia saw no need for marriage at all, and was upset when Vanessa talked of its inevitability: she could feel “a horrible necessity impending over us; a fate would descend and snatch us apart just as we had achieved freedom and happiness.” It was, however, Vanessa who she feared losing more than anything.

 

Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell

In the summer of 1905, Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa. She immediately declined, saying to Virginia that she was “conceited enough to believe that my family wants me,” and to Clive that his proposal had come as a surprise because she had “always taken it for granted that you thought me rather stupid and quite illiterate …”

Clive persisted through the following year, but it was only after the sudden and tragic death of their brother Thoby in November 1906 that Vanessa changed her mind and accepted. This double loss, as she felt it to be, struck Virginia hard. She couldn’t even admit to Thoby’s death to family friend Violet Dickinson and kept up a pretense of his recovery for two months. 

Of Vanessa’s engagement, she wrote, “I shall want all my sweetness to gild Nessa’s happiness. It does seem strange and intolerable sometimes …” A frank and fairly astonishing letter, written on the eve of Vanessa’s wedding, shows how possessive and jealous Virginia felt:

“We have been your humble Beasts since we first left our Isles, which is before we can remember, and during that time we have wooed you and sung many songs of winter and summer and autumn in the hope that thus enchanted you would condescend one day to marry us. But as we no longer expect this honour we entreat that you keep us still for your lovers, should you have need of such, and in that capacity we promise to abide well content always adoring you now as before.”

 

“A most amorous intercourse” — Clive, Vanessa, and Virginia

While the marriage had initially been a very happy one, the birth of their first son Julian, on February 4, 1908, marked the beginning of a detachment in Vanessa’s relationship with Clive. He struggled with fatherhood and couldn’t bear the noise, the disruption, and the deflection of attention from himself.

Virginia, too, felt displaced by and jealous of the new arrival, writing in 1908 to Violet Dickinson, “Nessa comes tomorrow — what one calls Nessa: but it means husband and baby, and of sister there is less than there used to be.”

Still, the letters that she wrote to Vanessa during this time are some of the most passionate and admiring that she ever wrote, fueled not only by jealousy but by Vanessa’s immediate blossoming into marriage and motherhood — a state that Virginia both longed for and dreaded for herself.

Vanessa wrote, “I read your letters over and decided with Clive that when they are published without their answers people will certainly think that we had a most amorous intercourse. They read more like love-letters than anything else…”

In the spring of 1908, against this heightened emotional backdrop and the preoccupation of Vanessa with the new baby, an affair of sorts began between Clive and Virginia — a sensual, intellectual flirtation that never became physical, but that still caused a great deal of pain to all involved.

While Clive was, and always had been, attracted to Virginia, Virginia herself was effectively attempting to seduce her sister through her husband, beseeching him in a letter, “Kiss her, most passionately, in all her private places … and tell her — what new thing is there to tell her? How fond I am of her husband?”

At the time Virginia was also working intensely on the novel that would become The Voyage Out, and Clive provided her with invaluable criticism, support, and encouragement. While vital for Virginia, this intellectual intimacy excluded Vanessa, who felt largely cut off from the worlds of art and literature by the demands of domesticity and motherhood.

Vanessa said nothing of how hurt and angry she felt but appeared to be accepting and understanding of the attraction Virginia held for Clive. Only much later did she come close to admitting her jealousy, while for Virginia, the affair would have lasting consequences: in 1952, she wrote to her friend Gwen Reverat that “my affair with Clive and Nessa … turned more of a knife in me that anything else has ever done.”

The affair continued intermittently until Vanessa fell in love with art critic and painter Roger Fry in 1911, and Virginia married Leonard Woolf the year after.

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Leonard and Virginia, 1912
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Marriage to Leonard and the question of family

When Virginia became engaged to Leonard Woolf, Vanessa experienced some of what Virginia had gone through when she became engaged to Clive. She wrote to Virginia that “although it was somehow so bewildering and upsetting when I did actually see you & Leonard together, I do now feel quite happy for you.”

It was Vanessa to whom both Leonard and Virginia turned when the subject of children was raised (despite the sexual side of the marriage not being what either had hoped for). Leonard maintained that it was a bad idea, given what he saw as Virginia’s inclination towards mental instability, while she was hopeful; Vanessa could see no reason why not.

Leonard prevailed, and twenty years later Virginia would write to a friend, “I’m always angry at myself for not having forced Leonard to take the risk in spite of doctors.”

That Vanessa had three children and a bustling family life at Charleston in Sussex would later be a source of both envy and contentment for Virginia.

In her 1928 diary, while sitting in the garden at Rodmell (her and Leonard’s house close to Charleston), she wrote, “Children playing: yes, & interrupting me; yes, & I have no children of my own; & Nessa has & yet I don’t want them any more, since my ideas so possess me & I detest more & more interruption …”

Virginia grew fond of Vanessa’s children, particularly Angelica who was born in 1918. She later admitted to Vanessa that “Angelica has become essential to me. An awful kind of spurious maternal feeling has taken possession of me.”

The Hogarth Press

When Virginia and Leonard first established The Hogarth Press in 1917, Vanessa was interested in the possibilities for artists from her  sister’s new venture. She suggested that they should publish a book of woodcuts by herself, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant. She clashed with Leonard, however, over the extent of artistic control, and the book never came to be.

Two years later, there was also friction over the printing of Vanessa’s woodcuts that were used as a frontispiece and endpaper for Virginia’s story, Kew Gardens. Vanessa felt that the printing was badly executed and didn’t hesitate to say so.

With her dependence on Vanessa’s good opinion, this threw Virginia into a state of nervous depression that took some weeks to lift. Despite this rocky beginning, Vanessa went on to design every dust jacket for Virginia’s books.

 

Mutual respect and inspiration

Throughout their lives, and despite intermittent jealousies and petty squabbles, the sisters were steadfast in their support for and admiration of each other’s work. They both took their art seriously, and each was a constant source of inspiration to the other.

Virginia created version after version of her sister in letters and diaries and as characters in her fiction: Helen Ambrose in The Voyage Out, Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day, Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, Susan in The Waves, and Maggie Pargiter in The Years.

It was always Vanessa whose approval mattered most to Virginia, and after the publication of The Waves, she wrote, “Nobody except Leonard matters to me as you matter, and nothing would ever make up for it if you didn’t like what I did … I always feel I’m writing more for you than for anybody.”

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Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s
Love Affair & Friendship
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Vita Sackville-West

Leonard was a stable force in Virginia’s life; a source of solid love and affection and of much of the maternal care that she had always sought from Vanessa. Romantic passion, however, was reserved for her relationships with women.

She never excluded her sister explicitly from this. When they were both nearly, fifty she wrote to Vanessa, “With you I am deeply passionately unrequitedly in love, and thank goodness your beauty is ruined, for my incestuous feeling may then be cooled — yet it has survived half a century of indifference..” 

Virginia also admitted that her attraction to Vita Sackville-West, which flared into a brief affair in 1925, then cooled into a lasting friendship, was partly because Vita reminded her in some ways of Vanessa.

Vanessa once more became jealous and felt left out: she wrote to Virginia in 1926, “Give my humble respects to Vita, who treats me as an Arab Steed looking from the corner of its eye on some long-eared mule — but then you do your best to stir up jealousy between us, so what can one expect?”

She was also jealous of the inspiration Vita seemed to give Virginia in her writing. Having been the central inspiration for characters in The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and To the Lighthouse, she now had to contend with the figure behind Orlando. “Don’t expend all your energies in letter-writing on her,” she wrote pettily to Virginia, “I consider I have first claim.”

Even Vita, however, could not be a real challenge for Vanessa’s preeminence in Virginia’s life. When Vita was abroad for four months, Virginia admitted that “I miss her, I suppose, not very intimately.” When Vanessa returned home from the South of France, however, Virginia wrote, “Mercifully, Nessa is back. My earth is watered again.”

 

“Madness is terrific”: the boundaries of emotion

While the sisters divided roles for themselves in life and in art, so they did in the realm of sanity. Virginia was cast as the unstable sister, a stereotype that has formed a great deal of her posthumous legacy and which she played up to during her lifetime.

In 1930, she wrote to Ethel Smyth, “Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.”

This left Vanessa, who was naturally disinclined to emotional displays, to be cast as the sane and stable one. It was not an entirely truthful separation, in that Vanessa did indeed experience strong emotion but was adept at concealing it. Even Leonard, in the early days of his courtship of Virginia, recognized that “the tranquility was to some extent superficial …”

The only time Vanessa fully allowed the mask to slip was at the death of her son Julian in the Spanish Civil War. Then, the sisters experienced a role reversal of the most extreme sort, with Vanessa incapacitated for several weeks, and Virginia caring for her nearly around the clock.

When she was largely recovered, Vanessa was unable to tell Virginia just how vital her care had been. Instead, she turned to Vita to tell Virginia on her behalf: “I cannot ever say how Virginia has helped me. Perhaps some day, not now, you will be able to tell her it’s true.”

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Virginia’s suicide letter to Leonard
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“You don’t know how much I depend on you”— final letters

In 1941, Virginia began to suffer from the kind of dark depression that she knew was associated with complete mental breakdown.

With the terrors of war never far away, her despair over being able to write, and being “buried” at the country house in Rodmell (and unable to get to London), her mind returned obsessively to the idea of family — to her parents, her dead brother Thoby, the children she never had, and her sister. Concerned, Vanessa wrote to her,

“You must not go and get ill just now. What shall we do when we’re invaded if you are a helpless invalid? … What should I have done all these last 3 years if you hadn’t been able to keep me alive and cheerful. You don’t know how much I depend on you.”

But even this plea from her beloved sister couldn’t prevent Virginia’s determination to avoid the plunge into madness that she so feared. The only way she could see to do that was to end her life.

She wrote two letters, one to Leonard and one to Vanessa. To Vanessa, she wrote, “If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know.” The letters were left together in the house on March 28, 1941, before Virginia walked the short distance to the River Ouse.

It was the Woolf’s gardener who telephoned Vanessa to tell her that Virginia was missing and feared drowned. She arrived at Rodmell to find Leonard “amazingly self-controlled and calm.” She, too, displayed her usual stoicism, saying that “Now we can only wait until the first horrors are over which somehow make it impossible to feel much.”

Vanessa didn’t attend Virginia’s cremation, which Leonard arranged and attended alone. He did, however, ask Vanessa’s advice about a memorial to Virginia:

“Leonard told me that there are two great elms at Rodmell which she always called Leonard and Virginia … He is going to bury her ashes under one and have a tablet on the tree with a quotation … He was afraid I’d think him sentimental but it seems so appropriate that I could only think it right.”

Vanessa continued to live at Charleston for the rest of her life, and also continued her working relationship with the Hogarth Press by designing the jackets for the books by Virginia that were published posthumously.

Vanessa Bell died at Charleston on April 7, 1961, nearly twenty years to the day since her sister walked into the River Ouse.

Further reading  

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy by Jane Dunn (2000)Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (1997)Virginia Woolf: Selected Diaries, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (2008)Virginia Woolf: Selected Letters, edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks (2008)Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist by Frances Spalding, Tauris Parke (2018)

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

The post Alliance of Sisters: The Complex Relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Unforgettable Books by South African Women Authors

Presented here is a survey of ten unforgettable books by South African women authors, including novels, narrative nonfiction, poetry, and more. 

From The Story of an African Farm set in the nineteenth century to Circles in a Forest from the Knysna forests, South Africa has long been an interesting place for authors to situate fiction and nonfiction.

Rich with history and exploring both the good and evil in humanity, works from Southern Africa can take the reader on an unforgettable journey through space and time.

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The Story of an African Farm
by Olive Schreiner (1883)

The Story of an African Farm is an intimate portrayal of family life on a South African farm in the 19th century. First published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, Olive Schreiner’s debut novel explores themes of Victorian culture intertwined with the South African experience.

Olive Schreiner (1855 – 1920) applied to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, but became a writer when her health prevented her from continuing medical studies. She used her personal experience spent as a governess on several South African farms to inform The Story of an African Farm.

Subtle themes throughout the book include portrayals of intimate relationships and feminism, two subjects that were especially controversial for women of its time. A near-epic, the original novel spanned 644 pages, over two volumes.

More about The Story of an African Farm.

 

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Black Butterflies: Selected Poems
by Ingrid Jonker (2007)

Black Butterflies collects some of author and anti-apartheid activist Ingrid Jonker’s (1933 – 1965) selected poems, translated into English from the Afrikaans language original. 

Partially edited by her Sixtiers-counterparts Jack Cope and Andre P. Brink with Antije Krog and Ingrid de Kok, Black Butterflies is kept as truthful as translation could get. Considered one of the most important though tragic South African poets, Jonker often drew comparisons to Sylvia Plath.

Most poems in this volume are taken from her second collection, Smoke and Ocre (Rook en Oker), published in 1963. It includes one of her most internationally famous poems, The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga.

More about Black Butterflies.

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And They Didn’t Die by Lauretta Ngcobo (1990)

And They Didn’t Die is a novel by South African activist and author Lauretta Ngcobo (1931 – 2015). Born in Ixopo, she attended Inanda Seminary School in Kwazulu-Natal (Durban) and went on to become a teacher, activist, and writer.

With a storyline set in 1950s South Africa, the book has become famous as a portrayal of women who lived under the Apartheid regime.

Ngcobo spent the years 1963 to 1994 in exile, though both her major novels were to be set in her home country. After her period in exile, she returned to Durban with her family and lived there until her death in 2015.

More about And They Didn’t Die.

 

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We’re Not All Like That
by Jeanne Goosen (1990)

Jeanne Goosen (1938 – 2020) was a prominent Afrikaans poet and academic. She debuted her first poetry collection `n Uil vlieg weg (An owl flies away) in 1971.

We’re not all like that was first published in Afrikaans, and translated into English by author Andre P. Brink. The novel explores the theme of poverty. Portraying an average white family and set in the 1950s, it was a topic that until then had been relatively unexplored in South African fiction.

Also notable is that the book is told from the perspective of Gertie, the youngest family member. Goosen credited reading Crime & Punishment as a teenager as her initial motivation to write. She later studied radiography and branched out into the formal study of piano playing.

More about We’re not all like that.

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The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer (2001)

One of the most acclaimed South African authors, Nadine Gordimer (1923 – 2014) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The Pickup was chosen as the winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book from Africa.

The Pickup is a complex love story between Julie, a South African, and Abdu, an immigrant from an Arab country that remains unnamed throughout the book. The novel is divided into two parts, with the first set in South Africa. The second part takes Julie into a country where she becomes the outsider.

Gordimer’s work explored themes of alienation, oppression, and other moral issues displayed through her fiction and characters.

She was a political activist for most of her adult life and was one of the first people Nelson Mandela reportedly asked to see upon his 1990 release from imprisonment. Her last novel, No Time Like the Present, was published in 2012.

More about The Pickup.

 

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The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena
by Elsa Joubert (1978, translated 1980)

The long journey of Poppie Nongena was first published in Afrikaans (1978) and translated into English two years later. The book tells the story of the title character, Poppie, as she finds her way through South Africa after being classified as an illegal citizen due to the death of her husband.

The book documents the character’s travels, from when she is uprooted from Lambert’s Bay to a safer destination. The story was also adapted into a stage production and later a movie titled Poppie Nongena.

Elsa Joubert (1922 – 2020) was a full-time author who documented her travel experiences from Uganda to Western Europe for several of her nonfiction books. 

More about The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena.

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Circles in a Forest
by Dalene Matthee (1984)

Dalene Matthee (1938 – 2005) is one of the most widely translated authors to emerge from South Africa, with her Forest Books series arguably the best known. Circles in a Forest explores the theme of nature conservation from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of the Knysna Forest.

Circles in a Forest focused on the Knysna woodcutters and the impact surrounding their exploitation of the environment and Knysna elephants.

Matthee followed Circles in a Forest with Fiela’s Child, The Mulberry Forest, and Dreamforest (later republished as Karoelina’s Forest). She was meticulous about translating the initial versions of her novels into English and did most of her own research for her novels. Circles in a Forest was first adapted to film in 1989.

More about Circles in a Forest.

 

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Between Two Worlds by Miriam Tlali (1975)

Between Two Worlds is a novel by Miriam Tlali (1933 – 2017), one of the first Black female authors to publish an English-language novel in Southern Africa. In this novel, race relationships are explored, as told from the perspective of Muriel, a bookkeeper who works in a store selling electronics.

The story explores interactions between the oppressed Muriel, who shares her world with the mostly white customers. Between Two Worlds is an honest and sensitive portrayal of daily life in 1960s South Africa.

While the novel doesn’t focus on atrocities and violence, it also doesn’t shy away from a candid portrayal of bygone times that many people still remember.

More about Between Two Worlds.

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Cape Malay Cookbook by Faldela Williams (1988)

The Cape Malay Cookbook by South African author and chef Faldela Williams (1952 – 2014) is considered one of the first truly comprehensive guides to Cape Malay recipes, featuring a mixture of traditional recipes that were mostly unknown until the book’s publication.

Williams was born in District Six and began her career in cuisine as a wedding caterer. Later, she realized that her recipes could be an inspiration to others for years to come.

She wrote two more cookbooks — More Cape Malay Cooking (1991) and The Cape Malay Illustrated Cookbook (2007).

More about The Cape Malay Cookbook.

 

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My 100 Favourite Herbs by Margaret Roberts (2018)

Margaret Roberts (1937 – 2017) was known in South Africa as an author and herbalist. She wrote more than forty books about herbs and their practical use. She licensed her name to the Margaret Roberts Herbal Centre, which continues to honor her memory.

My 100 Favourite Herbs is a clear, comprehensive look at her personal favourites in the garden — with more about how to plant and care for each. She wrote about plants with the ardor of a romance author, in love with nature.

Roberts was also one of the foremost lavender experts and cultivated the Margaret Roberts lavender from South Africa.

More about My 100 Favourite Herbs.

 

Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

The post 10 Unforgettable Books by South African Women Authors appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Ingrid Jonker, South African Poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist

Ingrid Jonker (September 19, 1933 – July 19, 1965) was a South African poet and founder of the emerging counterculture literary movement. The daughter of a Member of Parliament for the National Party, her views and work strongly opposed the apartheid government of the time.

Jonker has been compared to some of the most iconic modern female artists and poets, including Sylvia Plath. Her poetry, written in Afrikaans, has been more recently translated into English, as well as German, Dutch, French, Polish, Hindi, and other languages.

Jonker’s poem, “The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga” was recited by Nelson Mandela on May 24, 1994, signifying the past impact and end of the Apartheid-regime.

The poem begins:

The child is not dead
the child raises his fists against his mother
who screams Africa screams the smell
of freedom and heather
in the locations of the heart under siege

(Translation: Antjie Krog & André Brink, from Black Butterflies, published by Human & Rousseau, Cape Town, 2007. Read the rest of the poem here.)

 

Early life and literary beginnings

Ingrid Jonker was born in Douglas, Eastern Cape, South Africa to Beatrice Cilliers and Abraham Jonker, a Member of Parliament for the National Party. She had one sister, Anna Jonker.

After being accused of an affair, Beatrice left with the children and stayed on a neighboring farm. Ingrid and Anna would spend their childhoods moving between farms owned by her grandfather, Fanie Cilliers.

Her grandfather’s death brought more change for the family, and they moved again, from Strand to Gordon’s Bay. In 1944, her mother died from cancer, and Ingrid would spend time between her father’s home and a local boarding house.

Ingrid began to find her own way from 1951, asking to leave the family home in Plumstead. She wrote from a young age, sending her first collected poetry manuscript to NB Publishers at sixteen.

Poet and literary professor D.J. Opperman noticed her work, encouraging her to press ahead with her writing even when the collection was rejected for publication.

Shortly after her move from Plumstead, she found employment at a publishing house in Cape Town, though continued to write and correspond with other literary minds.

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Jonker in 1956
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Joining the ‘Sixtiers’ literary movement

Ingrid married Pieter Venter in 1956, the same year as the publication of her debut poetry collection entitled Ontvlugting (Escape). Their daughter, Simone Celliers-Jonker, was born in December, 1957. The couple separated soon after.

In the early 1960s, Ingrid would join the Sixtiers literary movement (‘Sestigers’): a counterculture of authors, poets, and others who embraced alternative values – and rejected the Apartheid system of the time. Rook en Oker (Smoke and Ochre), her second collection of poems, published in 1963.

Ingrid’s relationship with her father, who was still a supporter of arcane values, would remain under great strain until her death.

 

Death at an early age

Ingrid Jonker died on July 19, 1965 by suicide, walking into the ocean at Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town. She was not quite thirty-two.

While a formal, church-run funeral was held on 22 July, her closest friends held a private memorial event three days after (July 25) that allowed for her poetry to be read against the banning orders of the time.

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Posthumous acclaim and legacy

Most of Ingrid Jonker’s critical acclaim would take place years after her death. Remaining friends and associates would institute the Ingrid Jonker Prize for debut poetry in Afrikaans and English. The Collected Works of Ingrid Jonker, including one of her plays, was published in 1975.

As mentioned earlier, “The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga” was recited by Nelson Mandela on 24 May 1994, signifying the past impact and end of the Apartheid-regime.

In 2004, the South African government posthumously awarded Ingrid with the Order of Ikhamanga for excellence in arts, culture, literature, music, journalism and sport.

Several works have been produced about her life and death, including a 2001 documentary and the film Black Butterfly in 2011.

Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

More about Ingrid Jonker

Major Works

Ontvlugting (Escape), 1956Rook en Oker (Smoke and Ochre), 1963Collected Works, 1975

Poems by Ingrid Jonker

Several  poems by Ingrid Jonker translated into English are available online:

“You Have Tricked Me” “Daisies in Namaqualand” “ Little Grain of Sand” Several Jonker poems in English translation on AllPoetry.com

More Information

Official Website South African Government: Ingrid Jonker South African History Online SA History Ingrid Jonker: A Biography (Petrovna Metelerkamp)

Learn more about classic women poets and their poetry.

The post Ingrid Jonker, South African Poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.