What is women's nature?

Janet van Eeden in conversation with Lyndall Gordon, author of Mary Wollstonecraft, A New Genus

1. Lyndall, this is the first biography of yours I have read and I am going to make a real effort to find and read the others too. You have written about TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Charlotte Bronte, amongst others. What drew you to writing biographies in general and these writers in particular?

   I have never accepted a publisher's suggestion, because one has to have a passion for one's subject or for some issue or another in that subject's life. And this passion grows out of the biographer's own life. What gripped me in my first subject, the poet TS Eliot, was the religious life in its deep-souled aspect. This I'd experienced myself as a child as witness to the visions and ordeals of my mother, Rhoda Press. She grew up in what was a lonely part of Namaqualand in those days, and the biblical landscape of the veld shaped her searching religious spirit. Later she taught the Bible in Cape Town. She was a brilliant reader of Eliot - my first biography is dedicated to her. She felt that she was flawed and that she had to remake herself to become a vessel that the divine spirit could fill, and the same was true of Eliot. Although Eliot became a Christian and my mother was Jewish, the pattern of the religious life, moving through transforming ordeals, seemed much the same. The more I discovered about Eliot's life, the more obvious became the links between life and art. All the subsequent subjects were chosen for this link. I'm fascinated at the ways writers transmute (Eliot's word) the events and experiences of their lives into works of art.

   Each of the above subjects had something vital to teach about the genre of biography. Eliot taught me that every life has its distinctive form. Virginia Woolf taught me about the uses of memory. Charlotte Bronte alerted me to two vital aspects: gender and the gaps in a life. From Henry James I learnt the challenge of the farthest reaches of the inward life. To develop the possibilities of biography, to attempt to transform biography from a plodding genre into an art, has been my most private and ambitious motive. I do recognise that this is beyond me, a kind of mirage perhaps, but it's exciting to work on the frontiers of biography. Most reviewers and publishers don't have an inkling of this: they think the "golden age of biography" came to pass in the later 20th century, but I believe it is still to be. I want to get away from the illusion of "definitive biography" (which led to plodding tomes) and devise, instead, a form that has the narrative momentum of the novel without surrendering the prime advantage of biography: authenticity.

2. Tell me a little about yourself. Have you always been a writer, or was there a point in your life when you decided to become a writer?

   My mother, rather like Emily Dickinson, was writing in secret - she wrote poems and at her death left a whole oeuvre: stories too, and essays on the Bible. I always knew that her creativity was the real thing - she thought and spoke in images - while I was more ordinary. So although I wrote as a child - a diary, a rather derivative play for a group of friends, and a completion of one of my mother's unfinished stories - I never thought of myself as a writer. My first book (Eliot) was my thesis at university: I owe the encouragement to write this as a book to my husband, Siamon Gordon, who grew up speaking Afrikaans in Darling on the Weskus of the Cape. He's a scientist, but he's also a born reader and editor. He was critical as well as encouraging: he urged me to rewrite the opening of that first book twenty times, and then said, "It's still not right"; and I'd drip tears when he'd say, "If I were you I'd go back to the beginning and start again." He had the highest standards, and his principles (eg to cut every word that doesn't add significantly to the story) have remained a basis for revision. I'm fortunate to live with a mind of this calibre.

3. Could you tell me a bit about your other books, Shared Lives (A Memoir) and Two Women and His Art. What or who are they about?

   Shared Lives (reissued this year as a Virago paperback) is a South African memoir about growing up in Cape Town in the fifties. In a wider sense it's about women's friendship, the story of a group of girls who were shaped by the South African past, the absurdities of a girls' school and pressures to marry at an early age. Three of them, Romy, Rose, and Ellie, died young. At the centre of the group was Romy, the exuberant daughter of Jewish immigrants. The memoir follows Romy's rebellious course, Ellie's struggle with the loneliness of her career as a psychologist, and Rose's disappearance into marriage and motherhood. As narrator I try to bring out the meaning of their lives and reveal their hidden possibilities. Three obscure women who left nothing but their stories, letters, and memories are - hopefully - brought back to life.

   A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art opens with a strange and dramatic scene where the great novelist is trying to drown a boatload of dresses belonging to writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in the Venetian lagoon. She had fallen to her death from her Venetian window three months before. James's elusive friendship with Fenimore echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple, who had died twenty years earlier at the age of twenty-four. From their graves they haunt his imagination, Minny inspiring some of his most famous heroines in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, while Fenimore was resurrected in his tales. In this biography outward events are peeled back to glimpse the hidden stories of two women and untold secrets of James's life.

   Three novelists drew on this biography: Colm Toibin (for The Master); David Lodge (for Author! Author!; and Emma Tennant (for Felony).

4. In your biography Mary Wollstonecraft, A New Genus you refer to Mary's penchant for quoting from Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular. What parallels do you see between Hamlet, a tragic and heroic figure, and Mary Wollstonecraft?

   I'm going to reaname this biography Vindication - its original title and its title in America. It will be the title of the paperback due in January. As to Hamlet: Mary suffered from a long and intractable depression after the death of her beloved friend, Fanny Blood. It was in this period, in 1785-1786, while she had to press on in her failing school, day by day, that she quotes Hamlet in her letters: what they share is the feeling of futility in a sick world - "'tis an unweeded garden". That's the phrase resonating in her head. Then, too, there's Hamlet's sense of unfulfilled agency: that within which passes show - that sense of a great task to be done for which the depressed mind feels unready.

   Click on book cover to buy from kalahari.net Title: Mary Wollstonecraft - A New Genus Author: Lyndall Gordon ISBN: 0316728667 Publisher: Penguin Price: Normally R330.00, for a limited time on kalahari.net R264.00 Click here for Janet van Eeden's review of the biography. More reviews on NetReviews.

5. In this biography you talk about life in the 18th century England and say that men found ways to undermine women who dared to think for themselves. You quote Henry Fuseli, who called Mary "a philosophical sloven", commenting on her lack of elaborate hairdressing and artificial make-up. You say on p 132 that this is the "image of the unfeminine intellectual, dear to the mysogynist tradition". Do you find in the 21st century that men still find ways to undermine women who dare to act for themselves? If so, how?

   This seems to have been more pervasive in the past than it is in the present, though it no doubt does go on now. I've stressed this in the Victorian scenes of my biography of Charlotte Bronte and in the South African and New York scenes of Shared Lives. It's also there in James's treatment of the two women who were collaborators of sorts. And it's absolutely central to the "consciousness raising" of my milieu in New York in the late sixties and early seventies.

6. One of the things I admire enormously about Mary Wollstonecraft is her courage. You seem to focus on this too in your biography. You say that "Wollstonecraft presents the rare spectacle of a woman undertaking this (challenge) on her own through her commitment to self-education and her extraordinary self-possession." Could you comment on this a little more, please?

   In the fifth chapter, about Mary's experience as a governess to an aristocratic family in Ireland, she leads a double life: doing her duty by her pupils by day, and then late at night educating herself through high-flying writers like Rousseau. She's fascinated by the phenomenon of genius, clearly with a sense of her own rising powers. Her self-possession, though she is only in her late twenties, shows in her contempt for the empty frivolities of her aristocratic employers - though, interestingly, they do admire her and invite her to join them, a somewhat different attitude. Somewhat more aware and enlightened (I'm thinking of Irish respect for intelligence and the arts) than the philistinism the Bronte sisters would face fifty years later from middle-class industrialists who employed them in Yorkshire.

7. I was surprised to learn in your biography how close Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake were, in fact. Other biographers have mentioned him in passing, but you elaborate on their relationship through their work. I never knew that his "Daughters of Albion" was created to illustrate Mary's book Real Life. Do you think it was inevitable that two visionaries such as they were, met and worked together?

   There's lack of evidence here, unfortunately. One longs to know more. Blake was indeed part of the same publishing circle; they shared the same publisher. The main evidence of a work connection is Blake's 1791 illustrations for the second edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's collection of stories for children. His image of a governess with her arms spread over her two girl charges suggests a cross, but it's an image of benevolence and tenderness rather than the usual iconography of suffering. One sees an alternative world that might be possible if it could centre on what Wollstonecraft called the "domestic affections" in place of a governance based in contests of power.

8. Mary was way ahead of her time in her belief that children should be taught through experience of real life. This seems to pre-empt the 1970s British mode of using Drama in Education in Learning by Doing. In South Africa today we have Outcomes Based Education, which follows a similar principle. How do you think she came to think about education in this way?

   Remarkably, she seems to have understood this on her own - I can't think of any precedent for her first book, the outcome of her two years as a schoolmistress in her mid-twenties, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She also believed in teaching through the affections.

9. Joseph Johnson, the publisher in London who took Mary under his wing, was like a gift from the gods for her. He supported her emotionally as well as gave expression to her voice in her books. It is strongly believed that he was gay and so there were no sexual elements in their relationship, which made it less complicated. You also said earlier in your biography that "Rare women who succeeded in past centuries usually had fathers that empowered them. Elizabeth I is the most obvious example." Do you think this help from Joseph Johnson lessens her achievement in any way?

   Yes, he was a gift from the gods. No, to his lessening her achievement. You wouldn't say that a father like Henry VIII - that monster - lessened the achievement of Elizabeth I, though he did empower her, as she sometimes stated. And you wouldn't think that Jane Austen's father, the Rev George Austen, who encouraged her wit and taste with his own, lessened the superlativeness of her novels. No!

10. In my play, Jane Austen and Fanny Burney accuse Mary Wollstonecraft (who has been attacking them for writing frivolous novels) of "capitulation and weakness for such an ardent feminist who campaigned so fiercely against the institution" to marry William Godwin just before she died in childbirth. Do you think her marriage was a capitulation and showed signs of weakness?

    No. She devised with Godwin an innovative form of marriage which did not curtail the wife's independence. Virginia Woolf rightly calls this marriage "the most fruitful experiment" of Wollstonecraft's life.

11. What is your favourite piece of writing from the works of Mary Wollstonecraft?

    Her Travels in Scandinavia (available in Penguin classics), where she combines an intrepid journey by a single woman through far-off regions that were, at the time, off the map, so to speak, with acute observations as well as a confessional tone about the traveller's sorrows as a woman about to be deserted by a faithless partner.

12. What would you like readers to take away from the reading of your biography?

    I have tried to "vindicate" a woman who for two hundred years has been slandered as a wild woman, an aberration of womanhood, doomed to extinction. I hope that readers will be convinced by this new portrait of a compassionate and rational person who declared herself to be a new kind of being, "a new genus", who could not walk the beaten track. It is "against the bent of my nature," she said. So, the deep subject has less to do with the rights for which she's been famous than with an attempt to open up new questions for the 21st century: What is women's nature, and what is it open to us, at full strength, to contribute to civilisation?

13. Are you already working on your next novel, or is it too soon to contemplate another big task!?

    I'd most like to write a memoir of my mother, and also a life of Emily Dickinson, whom she resembles in many ways.

14. Anything else you would like to add?

    No, thanks. I've enjoyed answering these searching questions.

Click here to read reviews of Lyndall Gordon's book Mary Wollstonecraft - A new genus.



LitNet: 29 November 2005

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