The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

If, like me before last week, you haven’t read Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper‘ (1892), then follow the link to Project Gutenberg, and go no further here until you have. I have the Penguin edition above, and made the mistake of reading Kate Bolick’s Introduction first, which took away all the tension.

So, this is the story, written in the first person present, of a woman suffering from a nervous condition, whose doctor husband takes her away to a rented house –

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house … but that would be asking too much of fate!

and then persuades her to take the large, sunny room on the top (third) floor, a former nursery, and maybe a gym when the house was for a while a school; rather than a smaller, more comfortable room on the ground floor.

All her husband, John’s, persuasions sound like orders. He is the physician. He has only her best interests at heart. He knows best about how to manage her foolish fears, and her doctor brother agrees.

So I take phosphate or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again… Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

The shabby wall-paper in her room, the wall-paper of the title, torn off in large patches by the schoolboys, is “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow”, with one of “those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere.

The (unnamed) writer’s “work” is writing. We are reading a journal being kept in secret. Her husband does not want her to think about her illness; his sister, who is keeping house, believes it is writing which has made her sick.

Some weeks in to their three months long lease, we get the first hint of the problem developing:

I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

She’s lonely in the house, her husband away all day and some nights doctoring; lonely and unoccupied, but he will not let her go on a visit to friends, she is not strong enough, and she breaks down in tears and does not make her case very well. He says “I must use my will and self control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.”

I know you have all read this, all feminists have, I’m sure, and it’s probably compulsory in American colleges; but I wanted to open up the detail in the order that Gilman does. Here we are on the ninth page of 16 with a text book case of depression, and she is being told to snap out of it. I am sorry that Psyche is not here to discuss it with me.

I am aware that ‘snap out of it’ was a common reaction till quite recently; and also that nineteenth century women were fearful, as the writer is, of being institutionalized. Jess White looked at this with Rosa Praed’s daughter in Hearing Maud. But I also seem to remember, in Australia’s early days, so, much earlier than this story, that the people around him were aware that John Macarthur’s mania and depression were an illness, and were treated as such.

As I say, we’re more than halfway along, when we see, “There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.”

Bolick writes, Gilman’s “symbolic fictionalization of her own postpartum depression, shocked readers when it first appeared in 1892” and also led to the “forgotten masterpiece” being added, 80 years later, “to the then-nascent feminist canon” [which only adds to my belief that Australian women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century was much more overtly feminist than US (or British) women’s].

The baby is only mentioned a couple of more times, and while that might be a clever device, leaving us to draw our own conclusions, there is in fact no evidence the depression began with the birth, or that Gilman herself understands – presumably without the terminology – she might be suffering postpartum depression.

The remainder of the story concerns the writer’s gradual descent into madness, brilliantly described, until in the last page or so she becomes her own worst nightmare, but, luckily for us, still writing.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings, Penguin, 2019. Introduction by Kate Bolick. The Yellow Wall-Paper first pub. 1892.

From the Penguin bio:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) married CW Stetson in 1884 and was almost immediately pregnant with a daughter. After the birth she “sank into a deep depression” which lasted several years. She spent some time in a sanatorium, taking a rest cure; got out; had a nervous breakdown; left her husband in 1888 and went to California “where her recovery was swift”. In the 1890s she began writing and lecturing. In 1894 she relinquished custody of her daughter to Stetson.

Orwell on Antisemitism

Brona’s Reading George Orwell 2024

As you can see from the date on the cover, Orwell is writing in the last two or three years of WWII. The essay I am reviewing here, Antisemitism in Britain, was written in February 1945, and appeared in Contemporary Jewish Record, April, 1945, a month before the end of the War in Europe.

Orwell himself sometimes appeared antisemitic, especially early on. In his first work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), there are unnecessary references to Jews, perhaps reflecting his upbringing, the times, a lack of thought. But it appears it was a tendency he became aware of and battled with.

Anshel Pfeffer, in the Jewish magazine Forward (4 Aug 2012), reviewing Christopher Hitchens’ Foreword to Orwell’s Diaries, writes, “Even in his last years ‏(he died in 1950‏) Orwell was always quick to identify people, gratuitously, as Jews, in a way in which their Jewishness is seen an explanation to their situation, actions or appearance.”

But happily, for Orwell’s admirers, Pfeffer eventually arrives at the conclusion:

“Orwell was nothing if not honest, and Hitchens is right to defend him. He did try to educate himself away from his native prejudices, and even if not entirely successful in defeating them, he was scathingly honest about them. And how many other writers can we say that about?”

Antisemitism in Britain begins: “There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition, some thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees …” and goes on “… there is no real Jewish ‘problem’ in England. The Jews are not numerous enough or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called ‘intellectual circles’ that they have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted that antisemitism is on the increase …”

It’s an odd essay, or it feels odd to me. There’re no figures, no surveys, no evidence, just the general feelings we all get, talking to others, as I, for instance might in talking about racism amongst truck drivers. A milkman says to him: “A Jew don’t do no work, not the same as what an Englishman does. ‘E’s too clever,” and so on. One conclusion Orwell draws from these remarks is that there is a certain intellectual level above which people are ashamed of being antisemitic.

He then goes on, that causes of antisemitism are hard to determine, but that one might be the perception that victory (against Germany) will benefit the Jews. [Victory was probably the least we could do, given the huge numbers of Jewish refugees turned away from Britain and the USA before and in the early years of the War.] but also that Jews were perceived as profiteers and as cowards during the blitz.

Then, as though to answer my arguments above, he writes: “One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent antisemitism from being seriously studied” and that after the War it must be.

Sympathy for Jews means “there has been conscious suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities.” The ‘Jew Joke’ has disappeared from the stage and postcards; no writer would put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel. [So what does that say about Georgette Heyer who did so in The Grand Sophy just five years later.]

On the Palestine issue, too, it was de rigeur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs … you had a situation in which the press was in effect censored in favour of the Jews, while in private antisemitism was on the up.

Orwell concludes he doesn’t know where antisemitism comes from, and that it was probably more blatant in the 1920s and 30s, eg. in the writing of GK Chesterton, his “endless tirades against Jews”; but he thinks that it is a consequence of “nationalism” – presumably the concepts Briton and Jew each exclude the other. “I defy any modern intellectual”, he writes, “to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another.”

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George Orwell, Antisemitism in Britain, from S Orwell & I Angus (ed.s), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3, Penguin, London, 1970 (first pub. 1968). pp 378-388.

See also my reviews of:
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Preface to Animal Farm, Ukraine edition (1947)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Lazy Summer Days

Journal: 113

Denmark surf beach on a summers day

Gee has chosen a lovely spot to settle and bring up my grandkids. The south-west coast is cooler and damper than the rest of the state, and that will be more and more appreciated as the climate inexorably warms.

I haven’t been getting any work, so I went down there last weekend with the last of my ‘house’ furniture, which had been in storage. On Sunday, when I took that photo, we were watching my granddaughter in her surf lifesaving squad while waves of mist and drizzle blew across the beach from the hills behind us.

Mr 4 started school this week (and Ms 12 started high school). Meanwhile Milly is over at their sister’s helping her settle into a routine with the baby.

House price madness has finally returned to Perth after an absence of 15 years. Back then I put all my super into property, prices went down, and for most of the time since I have been underwater. With a bit of luck, I may at last be back in the black. Gee sold her Perth house over christmas, snapped up on the first day. My house, which I was left with when my marriage broke up, will be on the market shortly and hopefully will sell similarly promptly. And yes that’s stage 1 of preparing to retire, but this will not be a rushed process!

This afternoon (Friday) I should be out loading at last for a trip north. I did some work for this company when I first came off interstate three or four years ago, but Phlash, the manager, and I banged heads after he booked me for a load a few days ahead and then forgot to tell me when it was cancelled. On Wednesday, when I called in on him he was all smiles. We discussed prices, and yesterday he promised me a road train load to Paraburdoo, 1,500 kms north. We’ll see (as of 8am this morning, it’s on).

I haven’t been paying much attention to the weather up there, But I know it has been variously very hot and flooded. I’d better check. The ABC a week ago, says 132 mm fell on Newman, cutting the highway. BOM’s forecast for this coming Sat-Tues is 47, 47, 45, 43 (deg C). Well, I shouldn’t get bogged.

On the bookish front all this unwanted spare time is sort of translating into keeping up with my reading/ blogging. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d got a second job during Gen 0 Week. For those who didn’t see, next year (and the year after) we’ll do early Australian men (AWW Gen 0 Roundup).

My Reading Black Africa Project is off to a good start, though it feels like I did a lot of reading (Waugh, Cary, Achebe) with not much to show for it. Now, for Feb., I’m reading Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which is dense, not exactly hard going, but requiring a lot of thought and effort. I need a change of country and of gender, so for March I will read NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names, another childhood but in Zimbabwe and the US, and probably a couple of decades after The Famished Road.

I’m also trying to do one read/write up a month for Bron’s Orwell Project. Because I like Orwell, and I have plenty of his stuff I haven’t read yet. For next week’s Orwell post I went to put a link to my review of Down and Out in Paris and London, and it’s not there! I’m sure I’ve done one, surely WordPress wouldn’t lie to me. Now I’m going to have to remember all the insightful things I said first time round.

Recent audiobooks 

Ryka Aoki (F/Trans, USA), Light from Uncommon Stars (2021) – SF
Fay Weldon (F, Eng), Habits of the House (2012) – Hist Fic/Romance
Max Barry (M, Aust/Vic), Lexicon (2013) – SF

Currently Reading 

George Orwell (M, Eng), The Collected Essays, Vol.3 (1968) – NF
Omar Sakr (M, Aust/NSW), Son of Sin (2022)
Ben Okri (M, Nig), The Famished Road (1991)
Sally Rooney (F, Ire), Normal People (2018)
Elizabeth Gaskell (F, Eng), Ruth (1853)
Simon Haynes (M, Aust/WA), Hal Spacejock (2001) – SF

AWWC Jan 2024

Date	Contributor	Title
Wed 10	Elizabeth Lhuede	Happy new year 2024!
Wed 17	Bill Holloway	The Independent Woman in Australian Literature
Wed 24	Michelle Scott Tucker	Miss D and Miss N: an extraordinary partnership
Wed 31	Whispering Gums	Marion Simons, aka Stella Hope (et al)

No Longer at Ease, Chinua Achebe

Black Africa Project 2024

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was an Igbo man from Nigeria. It seems that prior to decolonization, identity was tribal rather than ‘national’; but after independence from Britain in 1960, Igbo people united to form their own breakaway nation, Biafra, leading to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), the eventual starving of the Biafrans into submission, and the deaths of millions.

I remember this playing out in the newspapers and on tv as I came to adulthood, as we are seeing again now. It would seem that genocide works quite well as a strategy in war, which doesn’t bode well for the Palestinians.

Achebe, already a renowned novelist, was in Biafra during the war, with his family, working with the administration, his writing restricted to poetry and short stories. After the war he became disillusioned with the Nigerian government and eventually, when he was able to leave, accepted a professorship in the US.

Achebe’s first three novels were a trilogy:
Things Fall Apart (1958)
No Longer at Ease (1960)
Arrow of God (1964)

Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God cover life in the earlier days of colonization, while No Longer at Ease is largely contemporaneous with Achebe’s own life.

Heinemann, having published Things Fall Apart, could see that it was too expensive for Nigerians, and so established the African Writers Series to produce cheap paperbacks by African writers, for sale to Africans. Achebe was made consulting editor.

As a young man, I read very little African literature, Cry the Beloved Country at school; then Black Mischief and Mr Johnson, because I read ‘all’ those authors’ books (Waugh and Cary); and later Conrad, Lessing, Coetzee, and finally Ben Okri’s Famished Road. I was so struck by the contrast between Waugh and Cary on one side and Okri on the other, that it still forms a big part of my motivation in undertaking this year’s project, reading Black Africa.

Not so strangely, I suppose, I read while researching this part of my review that Achebe was motivated to write by Conrad’s racism in Heart of Darkness, and by Cary’s depiction of Nigerians as “either savages or buffoons”.

Having ‘read’ No Longer at Ease as an audiobook early in December, I have taken advantage of the intervening time to re-read Black Mischief and Mr Johnson.

Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (1932)

This was Waugh’s third or fourth novel, written after a trip to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to cover the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. The setting is a large fictional island, Azania, off the coast of Somalia, which has a mixed African and Arab population, and is independent with an African emperor. The protagonists are Seth, who has just become Emperor, and a shiftless young upper middle class Englishman, Basil Seal, Seth’s classmate from Oxford, who is appointed the Emperor’s adviser.

Waugh makes fun of everyone, not least the lazy and stupid English consul and his family, and the devious (of course) French legation; but his portrayal of the locals – the (Irish) head of the army’s wife, “The Black Bitch”, the Armenian hotel keeper, the local tribal chiefs promoted to dukedoms and so on and so on, is unrelentingly racist.

Forget the plot, it’s just a variation on the theme of locals will fail if there are no Brits there to prop them up, which brings us to …

Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson (1939)

Cary, unlike Waugh, was familiar with Africa, having been with the Colonial civil service in Nigeria for a number of years before and following WWI. During the War he served with a Nigerian regiment. You could say Cary was quite an acute observer both of African life and of the civil service, but he is so certain of British superiority that locals are quite often characterised as monkeys or apes; locals in communities remote from town are ‘pagans’; and Mister Johnson, whose story this mostly is, is invariably portrayed as childish – telling stories (lies), unable to have money in his pocket, or even in prospect, without buying drink for the whole town, and servile to the current District Officer, most often Ruddeck (who seems to stand for Cary with his road building and marital problems).

At this distance, 90 odd years, we can see that the principal purpose of colonies was for Britain to steal other people’s wealth; but civil servants seemed to think they were doing locals a favour by running things for them. Cary probably saw himself as a generous, hard working man with no idea of the racism inherent in his unreflective feelings of superiority.

Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (1960)

No Longer at Ease is set mostly in Lagos in the 1950s, that is, in the years before Independence, and begins with the protagonist, Igbo man Obi Okonkwo, on trial for … I’m not sure if Achebe says right away, though the ‘summaries’ do, but the novel is the story of how Obi got to that point.

Although I won’t give away the final part of the book, if you are intending to read it yourself, and wish to learn developments only as the author reveals them, this is probably a good place to stop (but you can read the last para.).

Obi has received a scholarship/loan from the older men of his people who have moved into the cities and done well, the Umuofia Progressive Union, to study in England in order to return and work in Nigeria. In England he switches from Law to English; meets a young Nigerian woman, Clara; gets his degree; returns home; Clara is on the same boat; he moves in with his mate, Joseph in Lagos; gets a job in the civil service approving high school students for university scholarships; starts a relationship with Clara; they move in together.

There are interesting parallels with Mister Johnson, especially given that was the book Achebe most wanted to refute, in that Obi begins to consistently overspend his pay, to play the big man back home, undertaking to support siblings through school. And although he initially refuses the opportunity to take bribes, in the end he must.

Obi has two problems with Clara: she is osu – which is to say an Igbo of a caste he is forbidden to marry into; and she gets pregnant, with a baby they can’t keep.

This is an excellent novel on so many levels – the writing, and I’m sorry I don’t have a text copy from which I might take an extract; as a novel, the first novel by an African, of this place and time; for the Obi-Clara relationship, which is engrossing from beginning to end; and for Obi’s coming of age, which ends where we started, in court.

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Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease, Heinemann, London,1960. Clipper Audio narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez. 5.5 hours

see also, reviews by Jennifer/Tasmanian Bibliophile@Large –
Things Fall Apart (1958)
No Longer at Ease (1960)
Arrow of God (1964)

Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

Light from Uncommon Stars (2021) was recommended to me by one of you, Lou or Melanie probably – sorry I don’t remember – I bought it on Audible, listened, liked it and promptly forgot it (and forgot to list it in ‘Recent Audiobooks’). So this last trip I listened to it again and loved it.

The author, Ryka Aoki, is Japanese American, a trans woman, an author, a composer, a poet and a lecturer in English and Gender Studies. She appears to use the pronouns she/her – and her trans protagonist definitely does. This is her second novel. She has also published two ‘collections’.

The novel begins with Katrina Nguyen, a young trans woman and potential violin prodigy catching a bus out of town to get away from an abusive father and unsupportive mother. She’s making for Los Angeles where there’s a gay guy she thinks is supportive of her being trans, and who might give her a room.

He gives her a couch and he and his friends steal from her while she makes a little money from prostitution. Eventually he pawns her violin and she has no option but to leave. In the meantime she has met, on a park bench, and played for, Shizuka Satomi, an old woman and fabled (former) violin teacher.

Shizuka decides she wants Katrina to be her final pupil, waiting daily on the park bench until Katrina reappears. They recover Katrina’s violin; give it to Lucy Matía, the last in a family of male-only luthiers, to be restored; and Shizuka takes Katrina to her semi-rural home in the San Gabriel Valley, where she will be cared for by Shizuka’s housekeeper and friend (unnamed in any review or summary. I skip listen. Astrid).

This is a novel of strong women, set if not entirely in the Asian-American community, then still well to one side of mainstream America. Shizuka meets Lan Tran, a refugee woman running a donut shop, Starrgate Donuts, with her children, Shirley, Markus and the twins. Shizuka and Lan are attracted, but take a very long time to do anything about it. Shirley and Katrina, who are similarly aged, become friends, go shopping together as Katrina begins to accept she is secure, not outcast, not hunted.

Shizuka struggles with teaching Katrina, who till now, has been largely self taught and has developed a presence on the internet with videos of her playing the themes from games, rather than any of the classical repertoire. And so the story develops through to the inevitable climax where Katrina performs on stage to tumultuous acclaim.

Aoki’s rendering of Katrina’s story as a trans woman; of Shizuka’s as an ageing teacher with one last student; of Lucy’s, overcoming generations of opposition to her doing men’s work; of daily life in the Asian-American community are all brilliantly done. But wait, there’s more.

This is a Fantasy novel and a Science Fiction novel. Ursula Le Guin wrote, in her criticism of Margaret Atwood in 2009, that realistic fiction has complex characters and genre fiction has ‘types’. Le Guin’s own SF writing gives the lie to that, and in fact, I think it is a feature of women’s SF that by and large the characters are complex rather than types. Certainly, that is true here. The great bulk of this novel is ‘realistic’, yet the underlying themes are fantasy – Shizuka has sold her soul to the Devil; and SF – the Starrgate Donut shop is a buried spaceship; ‘Captain’ Lan Tran and her family are refugees from a distant, failing galactic civilization; and Shirley, her daughter and deputy, is a computer simulation and hologram projection.

Shizuka is known within the violin community as the Queen of Hell. For complicated reasons she has agreed with the Devil’s representative, Tremon, that she will deliver up to him the souls of seven superlative violinists. She has delivered six, and decides that she can train Katrina up to be the seventh. Katrina however, doesn’t have that fierce ambition that would lead her to give up her soul for worldly success, but when she becomes aware of the pact, she determines that she will accept Tremon’s offer anyway and save Shizuka.

Meanwhile, Lan Tran has a problem with Markus, her older son, and decides to return him to his father, one of the commanders in the war which is dooming her former home. She needs a pilot for the shuttle and orders Shirley to duplicate herself and to install a self-destruct routine. Shirley has grown from the brain of Lan Tran’s first child who died in infancy, but when push comes to shove Lan Tran treats her as a machine. She runs away from home and hides in the hologram projector at Katrina’s.

There’s a lot to resolve and Aoki does it very, very well.

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Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars, Tor Books, New York, 2021. Audible edition read by Cindy Kay. 13 hours

Mrs Gaskell & Me & the Independent Woman

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

For her second contribution to AWW Gen 0 Week Sue/Whispering Gums has reviewed Nell Stevens’ Mrs Gaskell & Me (2018), a hybrid memoir and biography. Maybe this is a trend, as one of Marcie McCauley’s posts was also of a contemporary author mixing her own story with that of the authors she was discussing – Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (2023).

Once again WG has matched the theme of her review to the theme of this week – the origins of the Independent Woman.

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Whispering Gums

It’s a bit of a stretch, I admit, to submit Nell Stevens’ strange hybrid biography-memoir, Mrs Gaskell and me, as my second contribution to Bill’s (The Australian Legend) Gen 0. But, having read Elizabeth Gaskell’s two novellas, Lizzie Leigh and Cousin Phillis, for the week, and having had Stevens’ book on my TBR for a few years, I decided it was now or never to get it off the shelf. After all, as I wrote in my Two Novellas post, Mrs (Elizabeth) Gaskell (1810-1865) is a good example of a nineteenth century independent woman because, despite being a wife and mother, she managed to forge a career for herself as a writer. Read on …

AWW Gen 0 Roundup

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

Sun. Woman and Labour (1911), Olive Schreiner (wadh)

Mon. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft (Brona)

Tue. Our Literary Grandmothers (Marcie McCauley)

Wed. The Independent Woman, continued (wadh)

Thu. Mrs Gaskell, Two Novellas (Whispering Gums)

Fri. Ruth (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell (wadh)

Sat. How to Read like a Woman (Marcie McCauley)

Sun. Mrs Gaskell & Me (Whispering Gums)

Herland (1915), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Grab the Lapels)
With Her in Ourland (1916), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Grab the Lapels)

Thank you all for taking part, readers and writers alike. I have been wondering for a long time about the origins of the Independent Woman in Aust. Lit. and I think we have shown over the past year that it was both a local manifestation of the 1890s New Woman movement – whose antecedents in English writing we have also looked at under the heading Gen 0 – but also something greater, uniquely Australian.

There is more on the AWW Gen 0 Page and any further contributions will be both noted as I go along and listed there.

I think I have a couple more Gen Weeks in me. So, I propose that in Jan ’25 we look at Australian men up to 1918 (Gens 1 & 2) and then in Jan ’26 from1919-1959 (Gen 3). By then I’ll be 75, or just about, a good time to retire.

I’ve already ‘done’ Joseph Furphy so the writers I am looking forward to most are Xavier Herbert and Frank Dalby Davidson, and I suppose early Patrick White, all Gen 3. But there’s still plenty of meat in Gens 1 & 2, Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood (I wonder who the first man was), and yes, all the Bulletin writers – Gordon, Lindsay, Paterson, Rudd. I’ve skipped Kendall – I might have to write a poetry review, I think my father had three or four of his collections. In fact I could review my father, he edited a book of WWI poetry.

Now I’m thinking about men’s Gen 0 – Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Beau Geste in England. ES Ellis in America. Stop me now!

How to Read Like a Woman

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

Mary Astell (1666-1731)

Marcie McCauley/Buried in Print has reviewed a contemporary book, Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (2023), whose subject, ostensibly at least, is four early English women thinkers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mary Wollstonecraft we have looked at before, but Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catherine Cockburn I don’t know at all.

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Buried in Print

In reading these women’s publications over and over, Penaluna began to reflect on women’s professional pursuits and how difficult it was to remain dedicated when women were expected to pursue marriage and family too. Although increasingly dissatisfied with the support she was receiving, both with her personal relationship and her professional goals, she was reluctant to step off either path. Read on …

Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

Ruth (1853) is one of not very many Victorian novels dealing with single motherhood. The others that I can think of are The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), Esther Waters (1894) by George Moore and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1892). There’s also Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow (1859) in which, as in Ruth, and perhaps as in all these accounts, a virtuous woman must deal with being seduced and made pregnant.

Esther Waters I only know of because Miles Franklin borrowed it from a young woman school teacher who was boarding with them when she was 16 or 17 (only a year or two after it was published). Wiki says it “is one of a group of Victorian novels that depict the life of a “fallen woman”, but doesn’t list any others. Franklin may have drawn on Esther Waters when she later wrote her own novel about an illegitimate child, Old Blastus of Bandicoot (1931).

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was from a Unitarian family and in 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester. They honeymooned in North Wales, which location plays a part in Ruth. She was friends with many writers including Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens – whose magazine Household Words was the initial publisher of many of her stories and novels. “In early 1850 Gaskell wrote to Dickens asking for advice about assisting a girl named Pasley whom she had visited in prison. Pasley provided her with a model for the title character of Ruth” (wiki).

Although popular in her lifetime, Gaskell fell out of favour, apparently for being a woman – Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists (1934) wrote, “[she] makes a creditable effort to overcome her natural deficiencies but all in vain” – but rose again in the 1960s for her early socialism (and also probably because Women’s Lib led to the reevaluation of many Victorian era women, in the UK as in Australia).

I think I can be sure in stating that Gaskell wrote Ruth not because she was in favour of Independent Women being single mothers, but because she thought that unmarried mothers should be treated with compassion rather than shame. Nevertheless the effect of that policy, if it were to be carried out, which of course it wasn’t until at least the 1970s, would be to make independence a bit easier. Financial support – from the father and from the Single Mother’s Benefit (which conservatives in Australia at least are still trying to wind back) – are the other side of that ‘easier’.

The novel begins with Ruth, 15, come to work and live in Mrs Mason’s sweatshop, sewing dresses, in a country town. Her father had been a farmer, but had allowed his property to fall into disrepair on the death of Ruth’s mother and had then died himself. Mrs Mason takes Ruth to a ball to make running repairs – flounces always seemed to be coming adrift in olden days. There she catches the attention of a young gentleman, Bellingham, in his twenties and in no hurry to get married, who arranges to meet her and walk with her after church.

One Sunday, Mrs Mason being out of town, they walk out to Ruth’s father’s old farm, and on their return Ruth is caught and summarily dismissed. Bellingham persuades Ruth that her only option now is to go with him.

A few months later we are in a tourist hotel in North Wales, which is lovingly described.

They settled down to a week’s enjoyment of that Alpine country. It was most true enjoyment to Ruth. It was opening a new sense; vast ideas of beauty and grandeur filled her mind at the sight of the mountains now first beheld in full majesty.

Loc 11979

At the hotel, Ruth’s situation is understood but tolerated. Unfortunately, Bellingham falls ill, his mother is called, the landlady allows Ruth to stay on as long as she stays out of the way. When Bellingham is removed, his mother leaves Ruth a note and £50. Ruth runs after the carriage, contemplates throwing herself into a river, is rescued by a small crippled man, Mr Benson, whom she helps in return when he falls down and injures his already frail back. Mr Benson takes her back to his lodgings – he is a ‘Dissenting’ minister on holidays from another town – and gives her into the care of his landlady. In the morning Ruth appears dead; Benson calls on his sister, Faith, for help, she arrives, a doctor is called, Ruth is found on coming out of her stupor to be pregnant.

Benson persuades his sister – and I think this is the core of the novel – that the sin which gave rise to the child, should not be visited on the child, and if she is repentant, nor on the mother.

“I can imagine that if the present occasion be taken rightly, and used well, all that is good in her may be raised to a height unmeasured but by God; while all that is evil and dark may, by His blessing, fade and disappear in the pure light of her child’s presence.”

Loc 12914

I have discussed this before, about Catherine Helen Spence for instance, that I admire the Unitarians and think they used their christianity to express a great deal of good socialist common sense.

The Bensons take Ruth home with them. A baby, Leonard, is born. The Bensons put about the fiction – not without great internal struggles – that the still teenage Ruth is a distant relative, Mrs Denbigh, and a widow.

There is no denying that the novel is an extended sermon about redemption, but it is nevertheless an excellent read, well written with a strong plot, as Ruth and Leonard become indispensable to the Benson’s household, and established in the community.

Eventually Ruth gets a position as nursery governess with a wealthy parishioner and becomes indispensable in that household too. But after some years of peace, Bellingham turns up (with another name); people who knew her in her former home town join up the dots; and she must acknowledge her disgrace and prepare Leonard to bear his share of it.

The only work available to her now is to nurse the sick and the poor. When typhus strikes the town only Ruth is willing to assist the doctors in the infirmary. She survives. In our Covid times, doesn’t this description ring a bell.

After some weeks the virulence of the fever abated; and the general panic subsided – indeed, a kind of fool-hardiness succeeded.

Loc 17861

She finds she is loved, the heroine of the hour. The book is near its end.

.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth, first pub. 1853. 432pp. Locations for quotes refer to The Complete Novels of Mrs Gaskell, Kindle. The cover pictured is from a ‘Barnes & Noble’ edition.

see also:
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (my review)
Mrs Gaskell, Two Novellas (Whispering Gums)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis (my review)

Mrs Gaskell, two novellas

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

George Richmond (1851)

I wonder why, of all the great novelists, only Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) gets “Mrs”. Today’s contributor to AWW Gen 0 Week is Sue/Whispering Gums whose first Gaskell, Cranford, had “Mrs Gaskell” as author, and that was probably quite common, up to the 1950s say. My first was most likely North and South, though I no longer have a copy, and the ones I do have just say ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’.

Sue has chosen to review two of Gaskell’s shorter works, Lizzie Leigh (1855) and Cousin Phillis (1863), fitting them well into my ongoing search for the origins of the ‘Independent Woman’.

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Whispering Gums

My Gaskell journey started in my teens when my mother, seeing my enthusiasm for Jane Austen, suggested I read Mrs (as she was on the book) Gaskell’s Cranford. From there I read North and south, Wives and daughters, and Ruth – all before blogging. I had hoped to read her first novel, Mary Barton, for this week, but when I saw how tight my reading schedule was this month, I decided to go for a novella (in the end, two novellas) instead. Read on …