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Readable Mothers
| Article
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13108 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
3,380 Words |
| Author
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Marilyn Butler
Marilyn Butler is professor of English literature at Cambridge
University. Her books include Maria Edgeworth: A Literary
Biography (Oxford, 1972), and Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
(Oxford, 1975), which is about to be reissued in a new editio |
Dale Spender is a lively, brash, popular writer who excels at exposing the scandals surrounding questions of gender. She became famous by writing books that made a single point, such as the way men have shaped language so that women can't use it. But in Mothers of the Novel she takes on two points, or so her publishers must have hoped. There's the old knock-em-down theme, which reveals the way men have told the history of early novels so that women didn't write them. And another theme, a fanfare for a new series of early novels by women, is that these early novels can be moving, sad, funny, profound, and we should go out and buy them.
Both the points Spender should be getting across are, I believe, true. It's not the case, as she seems to think, that no one before herself has discovered them. But no one has been able to interest the general reading public, because until now too few of the novels written by women before Austen have been in print in good cheap attractive editions. So it's sad that Spender has written a thoroughly bad book, which fails to explain why a literary form written for and often by women got turned into a men's club, and which also fails to convey the quality of the literary world we have lost.
The more serious of the failures is the missed opportunity to show that all or any of her hundred early women writers are worth reading. Spender hasn't grasped the first rule in writing about a writer other than oneself: Let the other woman speak. She hardly ever quotes from her novelists, and indeed spends little time, in a long book, discussing what they actually wrote. After devoting pages to the women writers' eventful lives, tough careers, and plummeting reputations, she generally moves on to a list of their titles, leaving out the characters they created, the scenes they staged, and the plots they hatched. You wouldn't suspect, unless you knew, that reading Delariviere Manley or Eliza Haywood entails living through a series of seductions, rapes, raptures, and betrayals or that Ann Radcliffe's thrillers are the natural precursors of Alfred Hitchcock's.
Spender attacks the men who taught her - a generation ago at Sydney University - for telling her that the English novel was fathered by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, rather than mothered by Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth. But in one sense her book proves her instructors did an efficient job. What they taught her to value in the early novel (lively external realism) and the method she should use to find it (amassing names, dates, life histories, plot summaries) is all still with her, dictating the way she thinks. Being
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