Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  It is appropriate, therefore, that Haworth Parsonage itself is perhaps the principal object of popular affection. Mrs. Gaskell did not start the identification of writer and place—the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 in Stratford has some claim to that honour—but Mrs. Gaskell’s setting of the Brontë sisters on the edge of the moors has greatly influenced the English literary inheritance. It combines a peculiar reverence for place, and a preoccupation with the formation of character. Just as artists have found inspiration on Salisbury Plain or among the Malvern Hills, so others have found consolation in areas which have become sacred or enchanted through their association with writers. From the 1870s forward there emerged a fashion for topographies or itineraries based upon the life of famous writers— The Homes of Tennyson, In the Steps of Charles Dickens, Bozland, Dickens’ Places and People, The Home and Early Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson are among the scores of volumes which appeared upon the subject. It became a national pursuit, and Tennyson was forced to move house in order to avoid the attentions and depredations of these literary tourists. There are many volumes upon the neighbourhood of the Lake District and Thomas Hardy’s semi-fictional “Wessex,” and there are books entitled A Writer’s Britain and The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles . The genius loci has many hearths in England.

  So Elizabeth Gaskell, inspired by the imaginative vision of her novels, re-created Charlotte Brontë. As a novelist she was preoccupied with details, and in similar fashion requested information on “the peculiar customs & character of the population toward Keighley.” As one of Mrs. Gaskell’s biographers has put it, “Charlotte Brontë’s life already fell easily into the patterns of Gaskell’s fiction, with its suffering daughters, profligate son and stern father, and its emphasis on upbringing and environment, female endurance and courage.” 11 Mrs. Gaskell lends strong imaginative shape to her biography, also, with letters and anecdotes reinforcing the pace and emphasis of the narrative. She was commenting upon Charlotte Brontë’s husband as an “exacting, rigid law-giving man” at the same time as she was creating just such a character, John Thornton, in North and South. In the Life, too, Elizabeth Gaskell comments that standards of behaviour and morality “in such a manufacturing place as Keighley in the north” are very different from those of any “stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south”; this of course is a principal theme of her novel North and South. But the resemblances do not end there. After the publication of the Life Charlotte Brontë’s father, Patrick Brontë, wrote to its author and informed her that “the truth of the matter is that I am, in some respects, a kindred likeness to the father of Margaret Hale in ‘North and South’—peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful.” The circle of “fact” and “fiction” becomes complete.

  It has also become evident that Mrs. Gaskell, like Boswell before her, omitted, edited and distorted details so that they might more accurately reflect her imaginative concerns. It was necessary for her purposes to emphasise the private and domestic life of Charlotte Brontë, for example, rather than to examine her professional career in proper detail. When Charles Kingsley wrote to congratulate her upon fashioning “the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by suffering” he touched upon an important truth; hers is a “picture” rather than a defined or definite reality. Gaskell omitted unfortunate facts, such as her heroine’s obsession with a Belgian schoolmaster, and frequently cut out significant details from Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence; she also chose to emphasise the endurance and courage of the three sisters, at the expense of downgrading their unhappy brother, Branwell. Gaskell, in other words, created the myth of the Brontës which may still linger among the readers of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

  The ambiguity of Mrs. Gaskell’s achievement was recognised at the time. George Eliot praised her for creating “an interior so strange, so original in its individual elements and so picturesque in its externals . . . that fiction has nothing more wild, touching and heart strengthening to place above it.” The anonymous writer in the Edinburgh Review declared that “Mrs. Gaskell appears to have learnt the art of the novel-writer so well that she cannot discharge from her palette the colours she has used in the pages of ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth.’ This biography opens precisely like a novel.” But of course it is precisely because it is “like a novel” that it has created an enduring impression upon successive generations of readers. It represents a very English art.

  Women and Anger

  Silhouette of Jane Austen

  CHAPTER 44

  Femality and Fiction

  There is a report this day, 6 June 2001, on the “Orange” prize for women’s fiction in which a male and female jury chose a notional winner; it is reliably stated that the jury of women were impressed by the “feeling” of the book, Kate Grenville ’s The Idea of Perfection, while the men were enthusiastic about its “artistry.” The commonplaces of the English imagination, as they are applied to women writers, still survive.

  It has generally been agreed, for example, that femality and fiction are related more naturally than femality and poetry; the novel, after all, is supposed to reside in the domain of lived experience, and to be guided by the promptings of observation or sentiment rather than the precepts of reason or theory. It has even been suggested that “the English novel seems to have been in some sense a female invention”1 with such paradigms as Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Ann Radcliffe. Fiction has been deemed a feminine occupation, too, “because it is commercial rather than aesthetic, practical rather than priestly.” 2 In the eighteenth century there was indeed “a common notion, or fear, that the novel had become a feminine genre,”3 not in the male tradition of theatrically conceived picaresque but in the sphere of moral or sentimental fiction. The epistolary novel was also considered to be a female form, despite or perhaps because of the example of Samuel Richardson (who was clandestinely described as “old-maidish” precisely because of the nature of his fiction). Letters and diaries had always been modes of writing considered to be appropriate for women, because they were not of their nature available in a public forum; now all that had changed. By the last decades of the eighteenth century the novel itself “was virtually taken over by women” to the extent that it came “to be identified as a woman’s form” with over half the inordinate production of fiction in that century emerging from female writers. 4 In the nineteenth century, too, the female prerogative was clear. Marian Evans, in her days before the baptism of George Eliot, wrote in the Westminster Review that “fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men . . . women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious specialty.”

  Equally significant, too, were the number of female readers. In Arcadia, written in the 1580s and regarded as one of the first English novels, Philip Sidney addressed the “fair ladies” who would read his romance; it might even be suggested that ever since the time of the courtly lais the association between fiction and a female audience was established. It has been surmised that three-quarters of the reading public in the eighteenth century were female; it was considered to the discredit of the novel, in particular, that it was read by scullery maids as well as by high-born ladies. The prolixity and heterogeneity of the form thus seemed to create an audience similarly disposed. In that century, too, “fiction was often thought to be the most powerful (although also the most condemned) element in girls’ education.”5 But the question, why Marian Evans and the Brontë sisters originally wrote under assumed male names, is not difficult to determine. They knew their strength, and wished to be judged on equal terms with male writers. They did not wish to be patronised or dismissed.

  Yet the question of “precious specialty,” in Marian Evans’s phrase, remains perplexing. Did the female novel exhibit the inflections of a special kind of experience or an inimitable form of expression? Was it a matter of a new and ingenious subjectivity, for example, or a peculiar access of spontaneity? Th
ere have been many attempts to decipher “female patterns” within fiction, especially in recent years; the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, a study of female literature, have suggested “a distinctively female literary tradition” which accommodates “images of enclosure and escape” as well as “obsessive descriptions of diseases.”6 They discuss George Eliot ’s “self-conscious relatedness to other women writers, her critique of male literary conventions,” and cite her “interest in clairvoyance and telepathy, her imagery of confinement, her schizophrenic sense of fragmentation.”7 In that sense, of course, she is close to the female authors of Gothic fiction whom in no other area does she resemble; her preoccupation with “clairvoyance and telepathy” not only links her with Charlotte and Emily Brontë but also with that broad school of women writers who eschew “realism” as part of a male-ordered or mail-ordered universe.

  For some female writers, however, there was no such alternative. In the seventeenth century Aphra Behn demanded “the Privilidge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me . . . to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in,” but complains that in practice “such Masculine Strokes in me, must not be allow’d.” The “masculine” powers which she invokes here are those of imagination and invention which, in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, were not deemed suitable for a woman. Behn remains important as the first professional female writer in England, however, “forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to owne it,” and as such she became synonymous in the English imagination with cupidity and immorality. She wrote everything—plays, poems, novels—and displayed a vivacious energy. “Whilst that which Admiration does Inspire/ In other Souls,” she wrote in one verse, “kindles in Mine a Fire” where “Fire” is the single most important and significant quality of her art. Thus was she branded a shame to all her sex, since her emphasis upon sexual gender in the act of self-assertion was also implicitly a reference to sexuality itself. This is the sub-text in all her compositions. Her witty juxtaposition of “masculine” and “feminine” parts in defence of her art led Virginia Woolf to define her “androgynous” mind as subtly subversive. In the public sphere she sympathised with the oppressed and exiled Stuarts, perhaps in native sympathy for all kinds of oppression, but her “Fire” is derived from passionate experience.

  There were of course women writers in the seventeenth century other than Aphra Behn—Mary Wroth and Rachel Speght among them—and it has been claimed that by the end of that century “women were participating in the major historical and literary shift that was to place prose at the heart of modern written culture.”8 Women were no longer intruders, but inhabitants, in the house of English literature. That is why, in the eighteenth century, there were at least traces of a recognisable tradition; women writers began to cite one another as authorities rather than as object lessons in extravagance or licentiousness. There was a great outpouring of literature which reached its apogee in Austen, Eliot and the Brontës. It has been surmised that in the 1790s there emerged “the first concerted expression of feminist thought in modern European culture” 9 as well as a number of books written specifically by women in the sphere of conduct, children and education. Printers and booksellers also responded to changes in female taste.

  The example of Fanny Burney, one of the most popular novelists of the eighteenth century, is of some significance. She was considered by Samuel Johnson to be “a writer of romances,” but from the beginning she was aware of the necessity for escape—escape, in particular, from “that inertness which casts the females upon themselves.” We may remark here upon a note of frustration, or anger, which seems to impel female creativity. As a child she had been denied the possibilities of education, while her brother was despatched to Charterhouse, and she describes herself in a biography of her father as “merely and literally self-educated.” She continues in an ironic fashion; “her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for exertion” was her father, “who, nevertheless, had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her any personal lessons; or even for directing her pursuits.” She found herself to be a charmed progenitor of language, however, and reported in her journal: “Making Words, now & then, in familiar writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of thinking, which, as Mr. Addison observes, we Females are not much addicted to.” The vexation is once again evident. Her biographer has commented upon the fact that her “freedom with language reflects her self-image as an ‘outsider’ in literature and her defiance of conventional limitations in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary.” 10 Fanny Burney was known to Virginia Woolf as “the Mother of English fiction,” and Macaulay suggested that her novels “vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters.” But she remained unassuming, even though her spirit and her career were devoted to the acknowledgement that “experience has a complex texture and that truth about it is elusive.”11 In a sense she left the theory, or at least its explication, to her successors.

  One philologist has described her “relaxed enjoyment of language for its own sake, and an unabashed pleasure in its flexibility,” 12 which in turn lends a further significance to the remark of a literary historian that “for women the creation remained part of the creator” 13 rather than a detached product to be viewed ironically or dispassionately. This is as much to say that the “natural” language of female writers is much closer both to the expression of the physical body and to the inflections of subjectivity. So when, for example, “the Victorians thought of the woman writer they immediately thought of the female body.”14 The experience of the body, and the experience of anger, are curiously entwined. One female critical theorist has described the process by which “feminine texts are very close to the voice, very close to the flesh of language . . . straight away at the threshold of feeling . . . I see it as an outpouring.”15 In her essay upon women’s literature in English, “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf suggested that “the book has somehow to be adapted to the body” and that “it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. . . . Think of things in themselves.” If this is the peaceful “stream of consciousness,” as adumbrated by Woolf, then it must be related to Julian of Norwich’s perception that her book of visions was “still in process.”16 The process is that of the interior life which cannot be ordered by rational perception, and of a female subjectivity which cannot become subject to male disciplines. It is what Fanny Burney meant, in self-deprecating fashion, by her “scribbleration.”

  In her second novel, Mary: and The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft depicted “feeling as the necessary instrument of female liberation,” with the addendum that if “feminine sensibility was an oppressive social construct, true feeling was a positive womanly quality and the hope for the future”;17 the male expectation of what is feminine and unfeminine must be wholly overturned. While the heroine Maria is languishing in prison it becomes plain that sorrow “must blunt or sharpen the faculties to the two opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination.” It is the imagination of Aphra Behn and Emily Brontë kicking, as it were, against the pricks.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century the female component of the English imagination was understood and celebrated. In 1748 The Female Right to Literature and, four years later, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their Writings appeared; in 1755 an anthology of poems written by women was issued under the title of Poems by EminentLadies. The fact that all of these volumes were composed and compiled by men does not alter the historical significance of the change in literary perception. Eliza Haywood launched the Female Spectator as a direct challenge to the male periodical, while the cult of the “Blue-Stocking” opened up hitherto inaccessible areas of male learning. “In former times, the pen, like the sword, was considered as consigned by nature to the hands of men,” Samuel Johnson wrote in 1753, but “the revolution of y
ears has now produced a generation of Amazons of the pen, who with the spirit of their predecessors have set masculine tyranny at defiance.”

  Jane Austen herself was indebted to her eighteenth-century predecessor Fanny Burney. The last chapter of Burney’s Cecilia intimates that “if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries . . . to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.” Austen also celebrated the nature and role of the novel in opposition to Burney’s own somewhat self-deprecating attitude towards the form she had helped to fashion. “I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers,” she stated in the fifth chapter of Northanger Abbey, “of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding . . . Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.” She imagines the response of a female reader, “Oh! It is only a novel!,” to which she adds her own acerbic commentary, “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Since in this context Austen cites Maria Edgeworth’s Belindaas well as Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla—in opposition to the work of Milton, Pope, Prior, Sterne and Addison—we are entitled to suggest that she was celebrating the merits of the female novel rather than those of male discourse.