Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon 9781472542700, 9780826434548, 9781441189042, 9781441178886

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Field of Modern Women Writers
1. Theories of the Canon
2. Iris Murdoch
3. Anita Brookner
4. Ruth Rendell
5. Emma Tennant
Conclusion: The Contemporary Scene
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W

Citation preview

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

Continuum Literary Studies Series Related titles available in the series: Doris Lessing Edited by Susan Watkins and Alice Ridout Fictions of Globalization James Annesley Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist Miles Leeson Women’s Fiction 1945–2005 Deborah Philips

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

Nick Turner

Continuum London The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

Continuum New York 80 Maiden Lane Suite 704 New York, NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com © Nick Turner 2010 Nick Turner has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-3454-8 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: The Field of Modern Women Writers 1. Theories of the Canon 2. Iris Murdoch 3. Anita Brookner 4. Ruth Rendell 5. Emma Tennant Conclusion: The Contemporary Scene

1 11 35 62 86 112 136

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

145 158 166 187

Acknowledgements

I am grateful more than I can say to many people who have helped with this work, particularly Dr Bill Hutchings, who has been endlessly supportive and read drafts several times. Professor Jackie Pearson, Professor Patricia Duncker and Professor Richard Todd have also given invaluable advice along the way. Thanks are also due to Emma Tennant, for agreeing to be interviewed, and to A. S. Byatt, Peter Conradi, Susana Onega, Anne Rowe and Patsy Stoneman for contributing ideas and references. I would also like to thank the team at Continuum Books for taking on the project, and particularly Anna Fleming and Colleen Coalter for their help. Many friends and family members have been supportive and encouraging in ways that cannot be repaid. Joan Addison, Julian Alderton, Tony Coombes, Alex Delap, Sonia Dry, Paul Dundon, Anne Harding, Kate Hart, Magdalena Kata, Linden Lack, Jon Lucas, Caroline Russell, Adam Stephens, Jean Turner, Peter Turner, Ania Wasielewska and Frances White deserve particular mention. You, and many others, have made it all seem worthwhile when things weren’t easy. Countless other people have helped and advised, both with the Ph.D. and the book. I thank you all. You know who you are. Chapter 2 is an extended and revised version of an earlier article, ‘Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon’, in Anne Rowe (ed.) Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 115–123, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction: The Field of Modern Women Writers

This book originates in various instances of self-questioning. Deciding which new play or film to go and see, or which new novel to read, I found myself choosing works because they had won prizes. Dancing at Lughnasa and Closer had won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, therefore they must be worth going to see, as must films such as Forrest Gump, Titanic or Chicago, all Oscar winners. Likewise, since Diana Rigg had won a BAFTA for her performance in the television drama Mother Love it must clearly be an outstanding piece of acting, and Booker Prize winner Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac the best novel published in 1984. Or must it? Unsurprisingly, I was often disappointed, and felt let down; the stamp of quality conferred by these prizes seemed misplaced. Like many, I suspect, there was an unconscious desire to flatter myself that I was doing something culturally worthwhile, and I came away instead feeling that these things were not the best productions in their field. Who was making these decisions, and how? In terms of literature, I began to be fascinated by the novels that were chosen, not only by the Booker committee, but by academics for research, and by universities and colleges to place on their syllabuses. It seemed a tricky matter. Assembling a course on the Victorian novel appeared relatively easy: Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, Hardy, and, to be up to date, Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins. All these novelists are familiar names, widely available, frequently filmed and televised; their names are synonymous with their period. But what to do about the novelists of the past 30 years, and the novelists being published now? How would a course director make choices from the thousands of available items? Modern and contemporary fiction is increasingly coming on to A-level and undergraduate courses: selections have to be made, and certain figures seem to crop up again and again. I wanted to know why, and I wanted to obtain further evidence to support my feeling that there might be people slipping through the net, that choices were being made for reasons that had nothing to do with literary merit. This is a book, then, about the canon, about the choices and value judgements which writers, readers, critics and teachers make; it asks some very large questions about how literature operates. Of the many large ideas that hover

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around this questioning of the canon, the largest and vaguest is ‘greatness’. It was a common assumption – until about 30 years ago – that writers survived because they were great. It was not a matter for debate. But this has now changed, and here we should pause for a moment over the nebulous term ‘greatness’. Art critic Jonathan Jones defines it as follows: If greatness in art has any meaning it is at odds with an opinion poll that throws it open to the people’s choice. If greatness exists it must be objective and absolute and therefore not ours to vote for. Greatness suggests a world historical significance, a sublimity. It has nothing to do with competition. It is, I suspect, a German Romantic idea. Greatness stresses the existence of a power – in this instance aesthetic – that transcends and dwarfs the individual. (2008, p. 10) German Romantic geniuses and power, transcending and dwarfing: it would be hard to think of a concept more masculine. It goes hand in hand with traditional cultural ideas of ‘Old Masters’, masterworks, masterpieces. We have immediately, then, a question of gender and the canon to be explored. Are women celebrated as cultural achievers? Are there Great Women in the canon? The concept seems sadly oxymoronic; great seems to equal Napoleonic. It is not new to say that women are and have been undervalued in literature; however, it does still need to be said. We can turn, though, back three centuries to the Bluestocking movement in Britain, recently celebrated in an exhibition and book titled Brilliant Women (2008). So perhaps there is evidence of female writers being acclaimed, and before Jane Austen. Brilliant Women highlights a painting of 1778 by Richard Samuel, ‘Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain)’. Here, painted allegorically, are Elizabeth Carter (poet, classicist and translator), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (poet and essayist), Angelica Kauffmann (painter), Elizabeth Sheridan (singer), Charlotte Lennox (novelist and poet), Hannah More (then known as a playwright), Elizabeth Montagu (literary critic), Elizabeth Griffith (novelist and playwright) and Catherine Macaulay (historian) – a selection from across the arts. This is not the first instance as such of women artists being acclaimed, and of course the concept of the Muse brings its own problems; nonetheless, it is heartening evidence. The problem is that, outside the academy and specializations, these names are no longer familiar. Yes – a novelist such as Charlotte Lennox may have been praised in her time; no – even her most famous work, The Female Quixote (1752), is solely the property of academics and postgraduates. Here, then, is a selection of eighteenth-century intellectuals who have been neglected, while Samuel Johnson, David Hume and Richard Brinsley Sheridan have prospered. A contrasting but equally important matter arises if we move to the last third of the nineteenth century, years when there were a very large number of novels

Introduction

3

by women being published. In 1893, Helen C. Black published Notable Women Authors of the Day. Who were they? According to Black, the list is as follows: Mrs Lynn Linton, Mrs Riddell, Mrs L. B. Walford, Rhoda Broughton, John Strange Winter (Mrs Arthur Stannard), Mrs Alexander, Helen Mathers, Florence Marryat, Mrs Lovett Cameron, Mrs Hungerford, Matilda Betham Edwards, Edna Lyall, Rosa Nouchette Carey, Adeline Sergeant, Mrs Edward Kennard, Jessie Fothergill, Lady Duffus Hardy, May Crommelin, Mrs Houston, Mrs Alex Fraser, Honourable Mrs Henry Chetwynd, Jean Middlemass, Augusta de Grasse Stevens, Mrs Leith Adams and Jean Ingelow. An initial reaction is the failure of Marie Corelli, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Ouida and Ellen Wood to feature on the list – all were writing at the time. Mona Caird, who did not publish her most famous novel, Daughters of Danaus, until 1894, was probably not included owing to her radical politics – for which she has been remembered. More obvious is the Ozymandias-like, but inevitable, situation where we see a list of once popular writers now almost totally forgotten, a fate that also befell Eliza Haywood, and many other women popular writers, in the eighteenth century. But novelists such as Braddon and Corelli, not included by Black, have had something of a revival. What is the reason for this? Are they better than the forgotten names above? And do they deserve this attention? If a writer of the past has been forgotten, there is often quite naturally a desire by scholars to resurrect them because of this, and sometimes by publishers to bring them back into print. This happened to Eliza Lynn Linton, and her novel The Rebel of the Family (1880), owing to its treatment of an issue: lesbianism. Rhoda Broughton, one of the most commercially successful authors of her era, has similarly been in print recently, as part of the academic interest in sensation fiction and portrayals of women in fiction. Here is a typical extract from her first major success, Not Wisely but Too Well (1867): Oh, the sea! the unpalling, the opal-coloured, the divine! What a thing a sea-place is in the summer weather! What does it matter if it is the most frightful collection of unsightly houses that ever disgraced a low coast – if dreary flats, than which nor pancakes nor flounders could be flatter, stretch away behind it, flank it on either side; if not the most abortive attempt at a tree is to be had, for love or money, within a circle of ten miles round it? . . . But anyhow, have we not got the dear, dear sea, and what can we want beside? (1993, p. 6) Scholars of Broughton’s work have never pretended that she was a ‘great’ writer; her faults, such as overwriting, excessive sentiment and bad grammar have been excused in favour of the social and historical interest her novels provide. Broughton’s work, and its reception, is fascinating in what it tells us about ideologies of the time and popular taste; however, a passage such as the above shows us exactly why Broughton disappeared. No one would deny the appeal of the novels as entertainment; but that does not mean they deserve cultural

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preservation in themselves. The historical and social circumstances provide an interest which we read into the text. These ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, as George Eliot saw them, and an established tradition of realism, were what Virginia Woolf wrote against; Woolf would find acclaim through experiment, innovation and analysis of the problems of women’s writing. Woolf has become nothing short of an icon, St Virginia perhaps, and following her a group of lesser known but still accomplished women, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamund Lehmann and Dorothy Richardson. But then there is Rebecca West, an equally dazzling figure, whose writing covered in fact a much wider range than Woolf. Rebecca West’s name features in literary histories, and some of her novels are in print, yet she is little read and studied. Similarly, Dorothy Whipple, a highly popular figure in her time, was almost forgotten, and even rejected by Virago, until Persephone books took up Someone at a Distance (1953). We can see, then, a pattern emerging of accomplished, innovative intellectual women who are allowed to fade and, equally, bestsellers who disappear totally. Perhaps, though, this is inevitable; perhaps there is only room for so many writers in the world, and only a few can survive the test of time. We should question, though, who survives, and why; the problem becomes more evident when we move to the period on which this book focuses, the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. Literary histories are the most useful guides to who is favoured, and Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel (1993) is representative. For Bradbury, the central women novelists of the period 1950–1990 are Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter and Margaret Drabble. Bradbury’s opinion is one shared by many; it is evidenced in a piece written by Rebecca West for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974 (p. 779). Here, although she has qualifications, West has particular praise for Lessing (‘this splendid figure may be styled the English George Sand . . . her strength is as the strength of ten’), which is not surprising, given the political passion of both novelists. West also admires Murdoch (again, with reservations), and talks of Drabble, Edna O’Brien and Penelope Mortimer, in addition. But the most interesting observation comes towards the end, when West discusses A Source of Embarrassment by A. L. Barker, ‘a novel as good perhaps as any of the novels written by the contemporaries here noted’. She had earlier described The Middling (1967) as ‘the finest book written by a woman in our time’ (Berridge, 2002, p. 22). Now this is, of course, just one person’s judgement, but it is the judgement of a respected literary figure. It may be wrong, and there is no reason why academics and readers should agree. Nonetheless, if someone as eminent as West praised Barker, and if the latter had won not only very favourable critical reviews but a place on the Booker shortlist, should not her work be still alive, studied, read, talked about? This does not seem to be the case, for Barker’s work is only just about in print, and she has next to no scholarly work published on her. One partial explanation may be the fact that Barker preferred writing short stories, and only produced novels on the insistence of

Introduction

5

her publishers; increasingly, in the second half of the twentieth century, the novel has become the dominant literary form, and it has become harder and harder for short stories to gain really serious respect and attention. Because we are close in time to A. L. Barker, perhaps, she has not had the chance to be taken up for historical reasons, or to have been absolutely forgotten and then unearthed again. Nonetheless, within this period, choices are made by academic institutions as to who is ‘worthy’, and it is right to question them. It is worth staying in 1974, a quarter of a century ago, the year of Barker’s novel, and also, in terms of the ‘leading’ post-war women novelists, the year of Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor and Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe. But it also the year that saw the publication of Days, by Eva Figes. Figes had won the Guardian Fiction Prize for her novel Winter Journey (1967), and had also published the highly influential feminist critical work Patriarchal Attitudes (1970). Unlike the other books of 1974 just listed, Days is no longer in print (the last edition came out in 1983), and, like the work of A. L. Barker, it has disappeared from academic view. The most fruitful comparison to be made, of these novels, is between those of Figes and Lessing, for both writers have a strongly political agenda, although in this particular work Lessing is interested in much larger questions of society and consciousness, and is beginning to embrace Sufism. They are the most experimental novels of the group, and the toughest on the reader. Lessing’s novel is in print, and is also much studied. One reason for this must be its difficulty. But difficulty does not necessarily equal merit, and there is a case to be made for The Memoirs of a Survivor being a failure, for it lacks all the following, things which many say novel should have – narrative drive; tension; linguistic inventiveness or flair; polemic and passion; character; intricacy and formal innovation or beauty. Lessing’s Sufist vision and rejection of realism are interesting, but they do not sustain a full novel. It has often, in fact, been remarked of Lessing that her style is poor. Lessing is at her most accomplished within a narrative framework driven by mystery (such as The Grass is Singing (1950)), or in the short story. Figes’s novel, however, is avant-garde, demanding, and satisfying. As with Lessing, we follow the thoughts and memories of an unnamed character. Figes’s woman is in a hospital bed: she is powerless, abandoned and imprisoned, as heroines have been as far back as Wollstonecraft and Burney. The use of stream of consciousness evokes Woolf, while Figes also manages to evoke a sense of mystery, and to make the woman representative of other women, and of humanity in general, ensnared in repetition and tedium and the approach of death. What is more, Figes’s stylistic experimentation, swapping of pronouns and playing of games with narrators both illustrates the shared female predicament, and contributes to the tension and aesthetic unity, as we see a sense of cycle, repetition and progression in the movement from mother to daughter. I have used deliberately evaluative language above, and some readers are likely to disagree with the claims; but I believe strongly that this kind of evaluation is lacking in much contemporary criticism, and the comparison highlights

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my conviction of the problems inherent in the literary reputations of modern British women novelists. We should return now, though, to the question of gender, and look at some evidence of just how well – or not – British women writers, artists and intellectuals per se have fared against their male counterparts, over the past half century. In 2004, Prospect magazine published a list of Britain’s top 100 intellectuals. This 100 included only 12 women (in terms of novelists, the inclusions were A. S. Byatt and Jeanette Winterson). The likely reason for this tremendous imbalance is not so much deliberate sexism, but the fact that, despite all that the women’s movement has achieved, cultural (as all forms of) life is still dominated by white men. Also, a shorter, more specialized list, where The Guardian chose only one woman (Sylvia Plath) for its 7 booklets on great poets in 2008, should be considered. Even more interesting was another list published by The Times of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Here, of course, the 50 comprised authors of not merely novels (often seen as something produced by and for women, suggesting that women should do well in the poll) but poetry and drama (traditionally identified as masculine). Worryingly, there are only 14 women here. Lessing is No. 5, with Spark at 8, Angela Carter at 10, and Murdoch at 12. The choices confirm Bradbury’s preferences, in effect. Further women novelists are as follows: Jan Morris (15); Penelope Fitzgerald (23); Philippa Pearce (24); Barbara Pym (25); Beryl Bainbridge (26); Anita Brookner (33); A. S. Byatt (34); J. K. Rowling (42); Alice Oswald (47); and Rosemary Sutcliff (49). There is something, clearly, unsatisfactory about this imbalance, outside of the disagreement that such lists always generate. This long-standing feeling that ‘brilliant women’ were not being recognized, borne out by evidence from the disproportionate number of women being shortlisted for and winning the Booker Prize, led to the creation of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996. This prize has generated enormous amounts of media coverage and argument; the reasons for its existence, and what it tries to do, are at the heart of the questions this book asks. Increasingly, being a prize winner seems to be the only guarantee of merit in the literary world, certainly in terms of booksellers, who use the Booker and the Orange as a stamp of quality, branding a book rather like an item of clothing. The good thing about this is that accomplished and interesting writers can be brought to public attention; the bad thing is the way in which writers who either do not win prizes, or are never entered, disappear from view, for if literary prizes are commercial stamps, then they are inherently geared towards audience satisfaction. Difficult, truly original writers, likely not to sell well, may consequently be unlikely to find their books even being considered for longlists. Rather worryingly, the British Council’s Contemporary Writers Database states that it works with ‘major prizewinners from the UK and Commonwealth’, as if winning a prize necessarily equates with literary excellence (http://www. contemporarywriters.com). Thus, in a long list of writers, there is no mention of Eva Figes, Emma Tennant and Christine Brooke-Rose, all of whom are

Introduction

7

alive and have produced books in the last decade, and all of whom have been identified as serious and original writers. The post-war canon on a wider level – to include America – is usefully evidenced by the contents page of Olga Kenyon’s Contemporary Women Novelists (1991). The key figures are Angela Carter (‘Fantasist and Feminist’), Alice Walker, Toni Morrison (‘The Great American Novelist is a Black Woman’) and Buchi Emecheta (‘Black Immigrant Experience in Britain’); Micheline Wandor, Bernice Rubens and Elaine Feinstein share a chapter titled ‘Jewish Women Writing in Britain’. Further chapters are titled ‘Black Women Novelists: An Introduction’ and ‘Caribbean Women Writers’. The organization of this material inspires, initially, delight: it is as much to be celebrated that Toni Morrison is perhaps the world’s leading woman writer as it is that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. At the same time, though, there is something a little depressing about this contents page. These writers are all interesting and should be read and studied, but there seems an overeagerness on Kenyon’s part to drive the study by issues. This is something we shall see more of later; there is an uncomfortable link between a need to right social and cultural wrongs, and a desire to teach and study literature with political correctness as a driving force. We should look at why Morrison is praised as she is. Has she been subconsciously feted because she is black and, if so, is there something patronizing about this? While Margaret Atwood, Morrison, Carter and Lessing rise, novelists who do not foreground issues such as race, gender and class, or embrace post-modernism, are not seen as worthy of being studied or written about. This can explain A. L. Barker’s marginalization; a recent example of the same problem is Candia McWilliam, while Brigid Brophy, another serious and critically esteemed writer of the 1960s and 1970s, is totally out of print and academically ignored. Brophy’s interests lay chiefly in the aesthetics of literature.1 It is not possible, from this brief discussion, to make firm claims, but while there has been and continues to be a huge market for popular fiction by and for women, and while many women have pushed the novel forward, being treated seriously and surviving the test of time are trickier matters. It is a problem for male writers too, of course, but we have seen, and shall continue to see, that women suffer more. So far I have only spoken generally about complicating factors; as the book progresses, we shall see in closer detail the problems encountered by four post-war British women novelists: Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Ruth Rendell and Emma Tennant. There would be an argument for analysing any novelist of this period, in fact; any literary career will have highs and lows, and produce evidence of changing fashions and differing interpretations. Lessing, who might be argued to be the ‘greatest’ British woman novelist of her generation, has encountered problems in her reputation owing to her seeming disavowal of feminism, and her embracing of science fiction; Carter troubled academics because of her playful stance, and her refusal to commit more strongly to feminism. Pat Barker found fame when she stopped writing social realism focusing on women, and wrote about

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men at war; A. S. Byatt did not become the subject of both academic and public attention until Possession (1990) won the Booker Prize – a novel that made use of (even if it did not endorse) post-modernism and structuralism. Byatt’s sister, Margaret Drabble, achieved success, both critically and in terms of popular esteem, by writing accessible realist novels about the domestic lives of educated women, but became unfashionable in the 1980s; at the same time Penelope Lively, a writer treading a line between liberal humanism and post-modernism, won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger (1987), yet is somehow viewed as middlebrow; not ‘sexy’ for study or research. There is Barbara Comyns, whose inventive comic fiction is only alive thanks to Virago; there is Alice Thomas Ellis, a highly individual stylist who is somehow not interesting to scholars and students. Most puzzling of all is the case of Zoë Fairbairns, a key feminist writer of the 1980s whose politically challenging and highly readable novels about women in the working world have been allowed to go out of print. All these writers, and others, deserve more analysis in terms of their status than can be given here; the appendix should be consulted for information about the standing of these and many other post-war British women novelists. One figure will recur again and again in this study, though: Angela Carter. Since her death in 1992, Carter has been a solid part of critical activity and is a favourite choice for teachers at A-level and undergraduate level. My assumption is that it has increasingly been Carter, rather than Lessing, who is the centre of the canon of post-war British women novelists, and thus I frequently test the figures in question against her. In effect, by choosing these four novelists, I am creating a personal canon, as open to debate as any other list. I selected Iris Murdoch for the simple reasons that I found The Sea, the Sea (1978) a moving and beautiful piece of work, that it had won the Booker Prize, and that its author was often claimed to be the best of her generation. This is a belief I support: Murdoch should survive, and in Chapter 2 I map the rise and fall of her academic and popular reputation, concluding with the assertion that her linguistic inventiveness, comic sense, and ability to create dramatic situations that transcend the local and specific make her great. Anita Brookner was selected because of the intriguing, old-fashioned oddity of her fiction, and because she too had won the Booker. In Chapter 3 I investigate how, like Murdoch, Brookner seems to embrace genre, although this is deceptive: in the end, I find that the author is contemporary and, again, universal in her portrayal of alienation and loss, while again writing with flair. In Chapter 4, I interrogate why a leading crime novelist such as Ruth Rendell has not been taken seriously by the literary establishment. Rendell, I find, is an accomplished genre writer; under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, she has also produced a series of highly successful fictions that, while being satisfying and innovative, are good without being great. Chapter 5 takes as its subject Emma Tennant, the most puzzling figure, in that she has done everything that would seem to promise literary success, yet remains marginalized. In the conclusion, I take my findings from these case studies, and the questions I have asked in the

Introduction

9

introduction, and apply them to visible examples of contemporary women’s writing. The very title of this book implies choices, and some clarification is needed as to its terms. For ‘Post-War’, I mean, simply, the period from 1945 to the end of the century, with reference (particularly in the conclusion) to the contemporary scene; it is not meant to convey that I am selecting novelists who write with a sense of being ‘post’ the Second World War and its effects. ‘British’ is a possibly dangerous term to use; it is very hard to assess, in many cases, if a writer is British (and indeed it does not really matter); the deciding factor for me has been whether or not the large part of their work has been produced in Great Britain (writers such as Deirdre Madden, born in Northern Ireland, would surely be happier being associated with Ireland). There is, as we have seen already, frequent reference to women writing in English overseas; but, for a form of comparative empirical study to be worthwhile, the test cases should have something in common. So we have four British novelists of the same period in time. The novel as a form has been chosen, since it is the most culturally and commercially visible literary form at the moment, as has been the case for some time, and it is, as previously stated, one particularly associated with women writers. All these writers have had uneasy relationships with the canon; all have either been, or been accused of being, generic; all seem both part of the establishment, yet have roots outside, and show feelings of ‘otherness’ in their fiction. As stated earlier, very large cultural questions are at stake here; the canon lies within larger matters for debate. In terms of ‘greatness’, the matter can be problematized beyond questions of gender. At the start of the twenty-first century, the drive to find greatness around us seems increasingly intense and often banal. There are quasi-academic productions such as 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006), with accompanying volumes discussing architecture and art and such; newspapers and television channels are crowded with lists of the hundred greatest films, or books, or songs, or sitcoms, or even Christmas television moments. These endless lists may be driven by commerce and their inherent entertainment value, but they are increasingly democratic: the people are choosing whom they wish to monumentalize, it seems, and deciding what is ‘good’. Does that mean, then, that anything goes? Can anything be art? Has art been dumbed down? That might have been a reaction to the intriguing Carsten Höller Slides in the Tate Modern in 2007 which were, in effect, a collection of metal tubes down which visitors young and old hurtled. Their existence demonstrated one argument: art is art when an institution names it as such. The slides also showed that art does not exist unless it is being read, looked at – or slid down. Without the audience, it is dead. Art needs to be interpreted to exist, but it also will bear more interpretation if it has ambiguity, complexity – and excellence, in short. This book, then, questions the concept of the canon, and the processes of ‘canonization’, but also argues that certain things should survive. These books

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are works of art – sometimes minor works of art, but works of art nonetheless. While recognizing that judgements are to some extent determined, and agreeing that canonical works have in the past solidified the position of the patriarchy, the existence of the art object in itself must be recognized (as Iris Murdoch argued). The book supports and, in effect, tests out Paul Crowther’s thesis in Defining Art, Creating the Canon (2007) and, particularly, his suggestion that metaphor is at the forefront of literary originality. Likewise, Richard Bradford is absolutely right to say that ‘academic critics should tackle literature on its own ground’, be ‘as amusing, as thoughtfully available and shiftlessly elegant as their subject’; that they ‘should evaluate and assess the qualities of fiction rather than treat it as a springboard for intellectual prating’ (2007, p. 247). This does not mean, however, that ‘theory’ should be seen as a destructive monster: simply, as both Terry Eagleton in After Theory (2002), and Valentine Cunningham in Reading After Theory (2005) argue, that other avenues should remain open. Cunningham believes in close reading, which will play a part here; for Eagleton, words like ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ need to make a return to discourses. This book supports what has become known as the ethical turn, and desires the return of liberal humanism to the forefront of British fiction. Murdoch’s defence of the human, below, is now starting to find favour, in the changing political climate of the new millennium, when multiculturalism and postmodernism alike are being challenged: statements are made, propositions are uttered, by individual incarnate persons . . . it is in the whole of this larger context that our familiar and essential concepts of truth and truthfulness live and work. ‘Truth’ is inseparable from individual contextual human responsibilities. (2003, p. 194) Writers both high and low must be given a hearing, for genre has its own rules, and Agatha Christie, although outside the remit of this book, is a brilliant practitioner. And women’s voices must be heard as much as men’s, for, no matter how optimistic the liberal press may be, we still live in a society which favours the white, middle-class male above all, and these politics demand continual investigation in every facet of life. I am also arguing for the recognition of good writing, for novelists who create a style of their own, for originality. The novel is alive and well, and is still the bright book of life; some of its purveyors have been forced into the shade, however, and this book, as well as asking why, hopes to bring them into the light: the ‘brilliant women’ novelists of our age.

Chapter 1

Theories of the Canon

Suppose a student were to approach you with the following (rather unlikely) problem: they were considering tackling the work of either Elizabeth Jane Howard or Zadie Smith, and were undecided as to whom they should study. Whose work could be explored most neatly in terms of current theories? The answer would partly be a subjective one, but Smith certainly pushes all the right critical buttons, while Howard lies somewhat forgotten and unread. This book interrogates the complex reasons which cause literary reputations to rise and fall, through case studies of individual novelists and the circumstances in which they have been studied and read. By the end we will be able to see exactly why somebody like Zadie Smith has been ‘canonized’ at the start of the twentyfirst century, and why so many writers, past and present, are not seen as the appropriate focus of scholarship. The canon wars, which have raged for a quarter of a century now, illustrate and parallel enormous changes in literary studies. A common assertion is that debate properly began with the publication of Leslie Fiedler and Houston A. Baker’s English Literature: Opening up the Canon in 1981, followed by a rapid succession of scholarly activity typified by Robert von Hallberg’s essay collection Canons (1984). This debate accompanies the politicization of literature and the apotheosis of post-modern scepticism, whose centrifugal tendencies are, depending on one’s beliefs, either carnival or anarchy. In the light of this extensive debate, we might wonder if there is anything left to say about the canon: has it not been questioned, attacked, demolished and rebuilt to the point where any traditional ideas are now an anachronism, and all the points for the prosecution and the defence have already been made? The problem for a twenty-first-century reader is picking through the chorus of voices, far too many of which are purely partisan and fail to weigh evidence adequately. Nonetheless, there are some pertinent arguments to address, before coming to my own conclusions about what the canon means today. This chapter will summarize the etymology of the word ‘canon’, trace its application to religious and secular texts, and then navigate some leading arguments in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century battles of the books. I do not propose an answer to the question of what the canon actually is, nor do I believe that, in fact, the academy would like the shutting of the book that would be the result, should

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Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

anyone be able to provide that answer. The matter is endlessly complex: critics might, in fact, find their literary views at odds with their political ones. George A. Kennedy provides a useful summary of the history of the word canon: The word ‘canon’ comes from the Greek kanon (perhaps derived from a Semitic word for ‘reed’), meaning a straight rod or bar used by a weaver or carpenter, then a rule or model in law or art. In the fourth century B.C. Polycrates carved a statue called ‘The Canon’, which established aesthetic rules for the representation of the human figure. The earliest application of kanon to describe written texts is a statement in the third chapter of the Letter to Pompeius by Dionysus of Halicarnassus that Herodotus is the best canon (that is, ‘model’) of Ionic historiography and Thucydides of Attic. (2000, p. 106) In the Oxford English Dictionary, the words ‘canon’, ‘canonicity’, ‘canonical’, ‘canonize’ and ‘canonization’ are defined as follows (with reference to law, literature and value): canon, n.1 1) a. A rule, law, or decree of the Church; esp. a rule laid down by an ecclesiastical Council. the canon (collectively) = canon law: b. canon law (formerly law canon: cf. F. droit canon): ecclesiastical law, as laid down in decrees of the Pope and statutes of councils. (See Gratian, Dist. iii. 2.). gen. a. A law, rule, edict (other than ecclesiastical). b. A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or c. A standard of judgement or authority; a test, criterion, means of discrimination. scientific treatment of a subject; e.g. canons of descent or inheritance; a logical, grammatical, or metrical canon; canons of criticism, taste, art, etc. 4. The collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired. Also transf., any set of sacred books; also, those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic. 1885 Encycl. Brit. XIX. 211/1 The dialogues forming part of the ‘Platonic canon’. 7. Mus. a. A species of musical composition in which the different parts take up the same subject one after another, either at the same or at a different pitch, in strict imitation. ADDITIONS DECEMBER 2002: canon, n.1 a. Literary Criticism. A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now freq. in the canon). Also (usu. with qualifying word): such a body of literature in a particular language, or from a particular culture, period, genre, etc. b. In extended use (esp. with reference to art or music): a body of works, etc., considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field. Freq. with qualifying word.

Theories of the Canon

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canonicity Canonicalness, canonical status, esp. the fact of being comprehended in the Canon of Scripture, or in any other sacred canon. canonical, a. (and n.) 1. Prescribed by, in conformity with, or having reference to ecclesiastical edict or canon law. 2. Of or belonging to the canon of Scripture. (Also used of other sacred books.) 4. gen. Of the nature of a canon or rule; of admitted authority, excellence, or supremacy; authoritative; orthodox, accepted; standard. 1796 Monthly Rev. XIX. 545 He remained the canonical geographer of the antients canonize, v. 1. trans. To place in the canon or calendar of the saints, according to the rules and with the ceremonies observed by the Church. 3. To deify, apotheosize. Obs. or arch. 4. fig. To treat as a saint or glorified person. 5. To make canonical; to admit into the Canon of Scripture, or (transf.) of authoritative writings. Canonization The action of canonizing; esp. formal admission into the calendar of saints. (Oxford English Dictionary