Tag: Female writer

Here is a novel where the backstory is better than the story. It weaves together the stories of two real women from the 14th century. One is an anchoress, Julian of Norwich. She lost her siblings and father to the plague, and then her husband and child. She decided to become an anchoress, which involves you going into a room in the church, and then them BRICKING YOU INSIDE. There is a window to the outside world, through which she gets food and can see people who come to ask her advice, but that’s it. CAN YOU IMAGINE YOUR ISSUES.

The other woman, Margery Kempe is arguably even stranger. She is the wife of a wealthy businesswoman. She has the number of children you have when you don’t have bodily autonomy, and she is suddenly overwhelmed with weeping at Christ’s suffering. She cries a lot, she preaches a lot, all the while being threatened with being burned alive for the revolutionary idea that she can have a personal relationship with Christ (ie., the basis for all contemporary Christianity). She ends up travelling the world doing all sorts.

What makes the book dull is that we have to hear a lot about their religious visions, which is as boring as hearing about people’s dreams. Actually probably more boring, because at least dreams can be new (an octopus ate my pasta) whereas Christian religious visions are not (man gives out fish, etc).

What I did find interesting was how we come to know about these women. For example, the housewife Margery Kempe is the first person to write an autobiography in English – a pretty major deal. And her wild and improbable story would have been totally lost to us, were it not for a houseguest, who in 1934 was searching in a closet for a pingpong ball, and dislodged a pile of papers which turns out to be the only surviving manuscript! It’s just wild to think how many lives are completely lost to us. Thank god we now have social media so every minute of important lives are minutely documented!

Speaking as a middle class person who lives in London I think I have had about as much as I can handle of novels by middle class people who live in London. I know this is not fair, but this book annoyed me. London has 10 million people in it, more than some countries (less than mid-sized Chinese cites), all of whom are I am sure very interesting and worthy of novels and etc. In any case, to this book.

It tells the story of a couple of generations of a family, each from their own perspective. This isa promising idea, and some of the he-said she-said of this I enjoyed. One sister in particular is uncertain of herself and yet helpful to everyone, without getting much appreciation. The framing was that we were supposed to feel for her, but I just wanted to smack her. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but honestly here’s how I feel: it’s not everyone else’s problem if you choose to be a doormat. That’s on you.

Here is a book in which someone is very, very angry about their Scottish childhood.  It opens with the tombstone of a teenage girl that reads:

Chewing gum, chewing gum sent me to my grave

My mother told me not to, but I disobeyed

This gives you a taster of the extremely bizarre world of this book.  From page one, you get the feeling you are in the hands of someone who knows what they want to say, and is going to go ahead and say it.  And indeed the introduction tells me that this was the author’s first and only book, written in her fifties, and when it arrived at her agent:

It needed no editing.  It was simply there in all its dark and glittering glory. 

It’s a story of a girl growing up, and is almost painful to read, reminding you how incredibly difficult it is to grow up.  Some of it is just a bit LOL, as when her breasts start to arrive, and her mother tells her that “a bosom is a beautiful and natural thing.” Her parents then “went away on a spring holiday, leaving Janet a small book to read.  It was an account of more of the beautiful and natural things which lay in store for her. Janet was appalled.”

But much of it is just much harder and sadder.  Her mother does not much like her, she is not very popular at school, and the amount of non-consensual groping that apparently went on in the first half of the twentieth century is honestly astounding. She is later badly affected by Hiroshima (you can see she is not the most ordinary little girl):

She could no longer have faith in God or man.  She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds and passions. 

I found this interesting.  Indeed, life being so unfair and random, you can see where the idea of the Greek gods does kind of make more sense than the Christian god.  It is interesting Western culture has gone for the latter. 

I loved this book but also did not love it. It tells the story of a woman born with wings. This is the nineteenth century, and she is female, so this means she ends up almost immediately in a brothel, and then in some kind of creepy situation with a man who is going to kill her. Maybe you don’t even need wings for this to happen for you, maybe it’s enough just to be poor.

In any case it is full of wonderful images. Here we are on her underwear: “elaborately intimate garments, wormy with ribbons, carious with lace, redolent of use, that she hurled around the room apparently at random. ” Or here she is talking about what she saw in the air: “the great dome of St Paul’s until it looked like the divine pap of the city, which for want of any other, I must needs call my natural mother” I never thought before how much St Paul’s looks like a breast, and now I will never be able to think of it any other way.

On the other hand, the book did kind of feel like it was going nowhere. It went from image to image and at some point I was just like SNORE. Probably I should have kept pushing through, but what can I say. Time is short.