How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Both Flora and Laura emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, which, as Virginia Nicholson shows in her rigorous, encouraging Singled Out, was the golden age of spinsters for the tragic reason that because of the First World War two million ‘surplus women’ had lost their sweethearts, or missed the chance of ever having sweethearts. The women coped, and some even thrived. Those who had never wanted to marry a man anyway, but didn’t have the confidence to rock a suit, tie, cropped hair and monocle like Radclyffe Hall (whose novel The Well of Loneliness came out in 1928), took the opportunity to quietly move in with their partners.

  E.M. Delafield’s 1919 shocker Consequences showed what could happen to those who weren’t so brave and resourceful; her naïve failed debutante enters a convent, spends ten miserable years being a nun, finally asserts herself and is released from her vows, but still feels so wrong and out of place as a single woman that she puts stones in her pockets and drowns herself in a pond on Hampstead Heath. It’s unremittingly bleak. I think of her every time I swim in the ponds – but she’s a warning, not an inspiration.

  Luckily, the 1930s threw up other heroines who didn’t define themselves through men, like Agatha Christie’s indefatigable Miss Marple, who debuted in 1930, and P.L. Travers’s unflappable, imperious magical nanny Mary Poppins (first in print in 1934), and Lady Slane, the heroine of Vita Sackville-West’s 1931 novel All Passion Spent, who is ecstatic to finally be single, when she is widowed at 88 after years of blameless duty as a diplomatic wife. And then there’s Sarah Burton, the heroine of Winifred Holtby’s 1936 novel South Riding.

  For a while I borrow Sarah’s mantra: ‘I was born to be a spinster, and, by God, I’m going to spin.’ She arrives in Yorkshire, battle-weary from bad, sad love affairs, determined to throw herself into work as the headmistress of a girls’ school. Almost immediately, she is derailed by a hero straight out of the Gothic. Robert Carne is her Rochester, and she knows it. Parallels abound. He’s rich, with a mad wife (in an asylum, not an attic), a little girl (his daughter, not his ward) and a lot of anger. Sarah really doesn’t want to fall in love with him. But she does. Head over heels, the whole business. And he loves her back, in his irascible, tormented way. Then he dies in an accident. Just dies. Just like that. And he’s gone.

  I couldn’t believe Holtby had killed him off. I was so caught up in the love story that I didn’t much care that Sarah’s good work was being scuppered. But as I read on, with bad grace, Sarah showed her mettle. I realised what kind of heroine Holtby really wanted to write: a heroine who learns to survive without love – which was exactly the kind of heroine I needed.

  Sarah finds a mentor. The sprightly Mrs Beddows is an iconoclast from way back; for years she’s been the only alderwoman on the local council (as was Holtby’s own inspiring mother). Beddows tells Sarah she’ll be a better teacher than ever because before she was invincible, now she understands shame and sorrow and frailty. But it’s not enough to save her. It’s only when Sarah is nearly killed in a plane crash that her will to live surges back. Bruised and bandaged but not defeated, she makes a stirring speech to her girls about how they should question everything from the arms race to poverty to misogyny. At the end, Sarah knows she’s found what she’s been looking for: not a gorgeous, stricken hero but Mrs Beddows whose ‘gaiety . . . kindliness . . . valour of the spirit [is] beckoning her on from a serene old age’.

  Holtby wrote this knowing she wouldn’t live to a serene old age. She was in the throes of Bright’s disease which killed her at 37; South Riding was published posthumously. But in her cruelly short life she worked out lots of ways to be single and happy. She threw her formidable energies into writing, into campaigning for pacifism, socialism and feminism, and into friendship. When her best friend Vera Brittain invited her to live with her and her husband, she also became joint parent to their children. Brittain was so keen to give her friend a big romantic finish that she dragged Holtby’s on–off lover to her deathbed and made him propose. I wonder if Holtby was more touched, as I am, by Brittain’s ardent attempt to make her best friend happy than by that last-ditch, half-hearted proposal from a man who didn’t really love her. Friendship, work, self-belief, and the values Holtby gives Mrs Beddows – gaiety, kindliness and valour – seemed a good basis for the single life.

  These qualities are not much in evidence in the single women in more contemporary fiction. It makes me sad to compare the intrepid spinster heroines of the 1920s and 1930s (including, of course, both Flora and Laura) with their modern sisters. I cringed at bitter Barbara Covett, in Zoë Heller’s fantastic, terrifying Notes on a Scandal, who destroys a young, pretty colleague out of loneliness and jealousy. And Bridget Jones made me laugh, a lot, but she didn’t help me discover how to live. Bridget talks the talk, but spends most of her time in love (mostly unrequited), chain-smoking, counting calories and sabotaging her own happiness, going back to the bad boy even after she’s got Mr Right. I know love is complicated but I wish she knew her own mind, I wish she wasn’t always choosing between the same two men, and I wish she was a bit more capable – I hate the scene where she makes blue string soup. No one’s that helpless in the kitchen. My favourite Helen Fielding heroine is not Bridget but her ranty friend Shazzer who calls herself a ‘singleton’ because ‘there’s more than one bloody way to live’ and sees herself as part of ‘a whole generation of single girls . . . with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and don’t need to wash anyone else’s socks’. Quite.

  Barbara Pym is often called the patron saint of spinsters, and Excellent Women, her 1952 debut, is hilarious too. But it’s also so sour. Her heroine Mildred Lathbury is so mordant and vinegary that it makes me weep. When she says she is ‘not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person’, I feel the ice close around my heart. This is going to be one of those laceratingly honest books where Rochester marries Blanche while Jane hangs around, condemned to being the eternal governess, in musty tweed. There is, it’s true, a lot of Mildred wearing bad clothes and eking out a tin of baked beans over several meals, and being imposed on dreadfully and everybody taking umbrage.

  But I’m being mean. There is lots to love about Pym. She is as funny as Austen, employing the same delicious irony on the same tiny canvas. Her spinsters are ‘excellent women’ – sturdy, energetic, capable, helpful – while the married women are debonair and incompetent. Men need ‘excellent women’ to smooth over life’s rough edges, but they marry women who don’t know how to wash a lettuce. The grey (in all senses) vicar in Excellent Women doesn’t go for Mildred but for Allegra Gray, a glam widow who manages to charm a bevy of spinsters into hemming her curtains for her. Mildred reads cookbooks when she is insomniac, and knows everything there is to know about stain removal. Her dazzling neighbour, Rockingham Napier, asks her to help around the house, but his wife is an anthropologist who cheerfully calls herself a slut and revels in being woefully undomestic.

  Is Mildred destined always to be an excellent woman? And if she is, will she never find love? She rebels a tiny bit – she makes the odd bold statement, she flirts (very mildly) with Rocky Napier, she buys new lipstick and makes herself some slightly more fashionable clothes. But mostly she is cynical about herself, and other women. A running gag is that Mildred is a shrewder social observer than the anthropologists whose job is to observe. She knows that one reason she’s been chosen to work at a charity for impoverished gentlewomen is because she may one day become one. She reprimands herself for caring about her appearance, because no one will notice. Arguing with her spinster friend Dora, she suddenly feels desolate as she imagines the two of them ‘in twenty or thirty years’ time, perhaps living together, bickering about silly trifles’. Ruthlessly she observes herself wolfing down her dinner, without dignity. When she goes to a pub, she tries not to be schoolmarmish and orders a bitter, but she finds it, well, bitter.

  There’s something so helpless about her. Her ugly, serviceable underwear mak
es her feel dejected, but she doesn’t replace it. She doesn’t know how to eat spaghetti. She can’t enjoy Rocky’s teasing because she worries so much. When Allegra offensively asks what spinsters do, Mildred gives the dreary, surrendered reply: ‘Oh, they stay at home with an aged parent and do the flowers, or . . . they have jobs and careers and live in bed-sitting-rooms or hostels. And then of course they become indispensable in the parish and some of them even go into religious communities.’ She doesn’t try to stick up for her life. She doesn’t point out that Allegra has no inner resources and would be sunk without a man. She doesn’t present her life in a flattering light. She doesn’t even have the pride to make something up. When she bravely tries to buy a new shade of lipstick she is embarrassed into buying a colour that doesn’t suit her, and humiliated by having to say its name, ‘Hawaiian Fire’; it’s funny but it makes Mildred seem pathetic, and why does she have to leave the shop with the wrong shade of lipstick, feeling absurd and ashamed? Why can’t she just buy a nicer colour? She does too much for people and ends up feeling resentful and bitter. She finds the idea of getting married ‘a little fantastic’. But why? She does have the odd suitor – with perhaps the emphasis on ‘odd’, but still . . .

  When the anthropologist Everard Bone invites her to dinner, she assumes she will have to do the cooking, pre-emptively imagines how this will make her back ache, and declines. Later, she does go, and finds he has organised dinner. But she’s not pleasantly surprised. She can’t seem to let herself be surprised any more, or experience pleasure.

  She doesn’t seem to like women either: she watches them in the ladies’ room at a shop, ‘working at their faces with savage concentration, opening their mouths wide, biting and licking their lips, stabbing at their noses and chins with powder-puffs’. It’s so judgmental. She resists true friendship; when she feels sad that she’s not really first in anyone’s life, she swallows down the words because she doesn’t want to have a heart-to-heart about it with her spinster friend Winifred.

  Mildred is at her best when she lets herself hope. She tries to talk about love, and her desire to be with someone splendid and romantic, but her repressed confidantes don’t respond, or don’t encourage her. She does value her independence – she refuses to share her flat, or move in with friends and, unlike Winifred, she makes her own clothes rather than dress in swag from parish jumble sales which would ‘swamp whatever individuality I possess’. She calls spinsterhood ‘a positive rather than a negative state’, but when Everard asks if that means excellent women can’t have feelings, she shuts down again and says they may have feelings but they mustn’t act on them. But why not?

  The novel asks what constitutes a full life. Rocky Napier says, in his teasing way, that Mildred lives ‘what is known as a full life’, but his wife snorts, ‘I thought that was the kind of life led by women who didn’t have a full life in the accepted sense’. At the end, Mildred thinks that helping Everard with his proof-reading, and defending the vicar from predatory women might give her a full life, but it doesn’t feel very full to me. She’s relieved that the Napiers are leaving. She’s found them too exciting. After one night out, she reflects, ‘Love was rather a terrible thing, I decided next morning, remembering the undercurrents of the evening before. Not perhaps my cup of tea.’ (Tea is very serious in Pym’s novels. There is food and drink, or the promise of food and drink, or the denial of food and drink, on every single page. You can even buy The Barbara Pym Cookbook and cook your way through all the food mentioned in the novels, from toad-in-the-hole to railway pudding and rabbit with forcemeat balls.) In church one sunny morning, Mildred feels so peaceful she wishes the Napiers had never moved in and disturbed her life. But life needs disturbing sometimes, doesn’t it? I can’t help feeling that Pym never quite got over working as a censor during the war, and never quite shook the habit of putting a red line through anything that might be dangerous.

  My disappointment in Mildred brings me back to Flora. I’ve been single for five years now and the ending seems very different. Flora’s rescuer doesn’t just turn up like a magical rescuer; she summons him. She has spent months solving other people’s problems, and now she brings that same charm and intelligence to bear on her own situation. She secures her own happy ending. And it’s really a new beginning. I wish I hadn’t given up on Flora. Maybe I should be trying to summon a rescue of my own. At my writers’ group, I panic that my life isn’t progressing smoothly towards its happy ending. ‘It’s the marriage plot,’ they say, ‘it’s exerting its pressure on your life.’ I feel I somehow need to guarantee that things will work out. Flora wouldn’t just sit in Soho, moaning about the marriage plot. She’d do something. I’m seconds away from agreeing to go on a disastrous-sounding blind date when it occurs to me to revisit To the Lighthouse.

  I first read Woolf’s slender novel at seventeen but I completely missed its pleasures and its point. It was written, of course, in 1927, and it’s a happy spinster novel. It actually is.

  At seventeen, I admired Mrs Ramsay’s polymorphous creativity, the way she makes food, makes marriages, makes people happy. Now I think I’d hate holidaying with her on Skye and her coming into my room at night to say ‘an unmarried woman has missed the best of life’, as she does with Lily Briscoe, the thirty-something spinster painter. Mrs Ramsay thinks Lily is a little fool and what with another guest, Charles Tansley, droning on that ‘Women can’t write, women can’t paint . . .’, Lily feels oppressed and uncertain and thinks maybe she should marry William Bankes as Mrs Ramsay says. Oh I know that feeling!

  And then comes the happiest page of the novel. Lily works out how to finish her painting, and exults: ‘she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody’. This glorious flash of creative power illuminates the rest of her life. She and William become friends, and their friendship becomes, she says, one of the pleasures of her life. She dismisses Charles as a man who always sits blocking the view. She rejects the inner voice that says she’s ‘not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid’. And then she draws the line that finishes her painting.

  She finishes the painting! She ends her novel single, and she gets sustenance from something that isn’t a man. I’m so glad to have finally found a happy fictional spinster that I go on about it, at great length, to a friend of mine, my sometimes writing-partner, whose friendship is, like William’s for Lily, one of the pleasures of my life. But he laughs. ‘It’s phallic,’ he says. ‘Have you never seen a lighthouse?’ I make such an extravagantly Middle Eastern gesture of outrage that I knock half our lunch off the table. Later, one of my book group stalwarts, one of the most intelligent and witty single women I know, startles me by saying ‘It’s not a phallus, but a dildo, and Lily can use it to pleasure herself.’ At least this is a feminist Freudian reading but still, I’m outraged. Who knew all my friends were Mr Mybugs? I’d like to bring Flora in to back me up. Because I don’t think it’s a phallus or a dildo. I can’t believe I’m even typing that sentence. A lighthouse is a symbol of self-sufficiency. Like the lighthouse keepers who live there, not needing anything from the mainland, Lily has become self-sufficient. And like the lighthouse beam that stops shipwrecks, she saves lives: she has saved her own life.

  Of course, Lily also breaks free of Mrs Ramsay. She stops trying to please her, and instead she claims her as her muse. Woolf based Mrs Ramsay on her mother, who died when Woolf was thirteen. After that, they stopped summering in St Ives under the beam of Godrevy Lighthouse and Woolf had her first breakdown. When she finished To the Lighthouse, Woolf felt she had exorcised her obsession with her mother. Just as Lily stops trying to please Mrs Ramsay, so Woolf immortalised her mother as Mrs Ramsay. It’s breathtaking. But it also makes me wonder: do I need to break free of my heroines, too?

  11

  SCHEHERAZADE

  I DON’T WANT to give up my heroines. The idea makes me feel bereft. For a few days I consider it. I imagine a life without heroines. I even read a Lee Child novel with a
tough title, Killing Floor, as a sort of palate-cleanser, thinking it will be the most male book I’ve ever read. But there’s a heroine in it too, a small-town cop whose supposed strength is constantly undercut by her dependence on the hero; nevertheless, I find myself trying to work out what I can learn from her, and realise I’m doing it again. Maybe I’m too addicted to heroines to stop. But is this addiction damaging? If I don’t give up my heroines, will it mean I can’t become a heroine myself?

  I turn to Patti Smith’s mesmerising memoir Just Kids. It is crammed with heroines and heroes but that doesn’t stop her becoming heroic. In fact, Just Kids tells the story of how she went from being a teenager in New Jersey, living with her family, working at a factory and accidentally pregnant, to becoming the iconic punk poet on the black-and-white cover of her first album, Horses, released the year I was born. I love every wrecked and passionate song on Horses.

  In New Jersey, making the difficult decision to put her baby up for adoption, Smith already knows who is in her pantheon. She loves Arthur Rimbaud, Nina Simone, Joan of Arc and William Blake. She speaks of them with reverence. She copies them and she learns from them. Like them, she has a burning desire to express herself, but she doesn’t know how. Will she write poetry like Rimbaud and Blake, sing like Simone, or start a revolution like Joan? She heads for New York to try to find out. It’s 1967. She befriends Robert Mapplethorpe, and together they turn themselves into artists.

  Smith experiments with painting, drawing, acting and writing. Mapplethorpe hasn’t yet settled on photography. But they have faith that they will find their way. They’re so skint that when they go to galleries they buy just one ticket, one going in while the other waits outside to hear a description of the show, but they tell each other that some day they’ll go in together and the work will be theirs. Meanwhile they keep exploring, ecstatically: ‘We gathered our coloured pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.’