The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present

Volume Ten

Mary Eagleton, Emma Parker, Mary Eagleton, Emma Parker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137294807
• eBook ISBN: 9781137294814
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

Part I
Women and Literary Culture

1

Fiction: From Realism to Postmodernism and Beyond

Clare Hanson

Over the last four decades, fiction written by women has moved from the margins to the centre of British culture. In 2012, for example, Hilary Mantel dominated the literary landscape, winning the Man Booker prize for the second time with Bring up the Bodies, which also won the Costa Novel and Costa Book of the Year awards. Congratulating Mantel, the chair of the Man Booker panel described her as ‘the greatest modern English prose writer’, an accolade that was widely endorsed.¹ What is striking about Mantel’s success is that it came out of her return to the historical novel, a genre which has often been dismissed as popular and escapist.² Mantel rereads and reinvents the genre, exploiting its ambivalent position between fact and fiction in order to probe the permeable boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead. Taking Mantel’s achievement as its cue, this chapter argues that a self-conscious approach to narrative form is the most salient feature of fiction written by women in this period. The existing conventions of realism came under pressure as such writers probed the limits of representation, aiming to put ‘new wine into old bottles’, as Angela Carter (1940–92) so memorably expressed it.³ Realism is an umbrella term, referring to a disposition rather than a form. As Andrzej Gasiorek has suggested, it signals ‘not so much a set of textual characteristics as a general cognitive stance vis-a-vis the world, which finds different expression at different historical moments’.⁴ Realist texts are connected, however, by a commitment to referentiality which is interrogated and often radically reconfigured in the fiction discussed below.

Varieties of realism

The 1970s saw a renewed focus on the domestic sphere in literary fiction, at a time when second-wave feminism was identifying the family as the major site of women’s oppression. Many writers knew little of the emerging feminist movement but a generation of women who had benefited from the postwar education system were struggling to reconcile professional ambition with the continuing demands of domesticity, and novelists such as Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, and Anita Brookner turned to the genre of domestic realism to address this conflict and the challenge to gender roles that went with it.⁵ Their fiction is self-reflexive and richly allusive, located within the tradition it seeks to subvert. In Drabble’s early work, for example, the protagonists are named after the heroines of nineteenth-century novels, who are frequently invoked and mocked as outdated figures only for the narrative to register significant continuities in terms of constraints on women’s lives. In The Waterfall (1969), Jane Grey smugly contrasts her liberated life with that of Austen’s Emma, reflecting that ‘Emma got what she deserved, in marrying Mr Knightley. What can it have been like, in bed with Mr Knightley?’⁶ Yet Jane’s adulterous affair leads indirectly to a thrombosis caused by the pill, which the narrator represents in terms which signal women’s limited progress towards sexual autonomy, commenting that the blood clot is ‘the price that modern woman must pay for love ... in old novels, the price of love was death’ (p. 239).

From this point on, Drabble’s fiction moves outwards to map the connections between the domestic sphere and social and political forces. In the late 1980s, for example, she published a state-of-the-nation trilogy probing the radical shift in values associated with Margaret Thatcher’s government.⁷ This was a time of reaction against the welfare state and an aggressive emphasis on competitive individualism, which Drabble critiques from the perspective of protagonists such as the social worker Alix in The Radiant Way (1987). Responding to the cuts and job losses of the 1970s, Alix feels ‘a kind of terrible grinding disaffection’ which leads her to abandon her efforts ‘to serve the community’.⁸ However, as the trilogy progresses, her moral sense finds an outlet in the acceptance of extended family commitments, reflecting the privatization of social responsibility associated with neoliberal values. Here again Drabble highlights continuity and change in women’s lives via literary allusion, comparing the status of Jane Austen and George Eliot’s protagonists with the less-privileged circumstances of her female characters. The form of these novels is also opened up to scrutiny through self-reflexive endings which draw attention to their own artifice, though Drabble retains her commitment to realism as a form which enables the writer ‘to use your eyes and tell the truth’.⁹

Byatt’s fiction engages explicitly with the challenge posed to realism by poststructuralism. This is an issue she has explored in a number of her essays, where she argues against what she sees as the poststructuralists’ overemphasis on the disjunction between word and world. In her view, it is possible for a text to be ‘supremely mimetic ... but at the same time to think about form, its own form, its own formation, about perceiving and inventing the world’.¹⁰ She argues that the novel can both invoke and reflect on materiality, a potential which she exploits in order to explore the relationship between language and being. This is a central theme of her fiction and a recurring concern for all her main protagonists. Frederica Potter, for example, the main character in the so-called Frederica Quartet (1978–2002), reflects on D.H. Lawrence’s claim that the novel is ‘the one bright book of Life’ and concludes that in such a book ‘you have to have it all, the Word made flesh, the rainbow, the stars, the One’.¹¹ As these comments suggest, the discourse of religion offers another key resource for Byatt’s thinking about the relationships between word and flesh, mind and matter, fiction and reality. These oppositions overlap and fold into one another through the analogical structure of her fiction which suggests parallels between, for example, the pleasures of sex and those of reading. However, such connections are always heavily qualified, for Byatt is suspicious of facile pattern-making. For her, patterns of thought are both seductive and dangerous, a point of view expressed by the character Roland in Possession (1990) when he says ‘everything connects and connects – all the time ... these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful – as though we held a clue to the true nature of things’.¹² Roland argues that the textual play associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism is inadequate to the truth of experience because it is ultimately solipsistic, leading us to a point where ‘we’re imprisoned in ourselves – we can’t see things’ (p. 254). Byatt is committed to the representation of the inner life and the external universe and to the belief that words refer to each other but also, necessarily, to things, insisting in a 1989 essay that ‘I do believe language has denotative as well as connotative powers’.¹³ So although her fiction is sometimes seen as postmodern because of its self-reflexive qualities, it would be more accurate to say that it incorporates postmodern insights in order to shape a more flexible and expansive kind of realism.

Byatt’s fiction is firmly located in Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ of the English novel and is in dialogue with the work of George Eliot, Hardy, and Lawrence. Brookner’s work is similarly allusive but freighted with references to the European literature which formed the backdrop to her career as an art historian.¹⁴ The intertexts of her early novels include Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (1833) and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816), both of which invoke a Romantic ideal of love with which she has expressed sympathy. In an interview she suggests that her novels can be aligned with a Romantic tradition which she distinguishes from popular romance on the grounds that ‘in the genuine Romantic novel there is confrontation with truth and in the “romance” novel a similar confrontation with a surrogate, plastic version of the truth. Romantic writers are characterized by absolute longing – perhaps for something that is not there and cannot be there.’¹⁵ This distinction is both dramatized and called into question in her Booker Prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac (1984), in which the protagonist Edith Hope is a writer of formulaic romances with titles like Beneath the Visiting Moon. Brookner’s novel, in contrast, ‘confronts the truth’ of the likely fate of a woman such as Edith, who rejects a marriage of convenience in order to remain true to her idea(l) of love. This ideal is ambiguous: it can be dismissed as a fantasy just like the romances Edith writes but, on the other hand, her commitment represents fidelity to the truth of her feelings, to ‘absolute longing’. The apparently clear-cut distinction between the ideals of Romanticism and the emotions associated with popular romance is thus undercut in Brookner’s text, which in this sense offers a challenge to rigid genre boundaries and gendered cultural hierarchies. However, Edith’s fidelity involves renunciation and self-abnegation, recurring themes in Brookner’s work which have attracted a good deal of hostile criticism. Reviewing Hotel du Lac, Adam Mars-Jones, for example, comments on Brookner’s ‘masochism’ and her ‘passive-aggressive heroines’.¹⁶ Yet her novels offer far more than this critique suggests in their subtle exploration of the ways in which character is formed by the pressures of early life: one of the novels even has the Freudian title A Family Romance (1993). Brookner is particularly interested in parents who subordinate their children’s needs to their own, and in this respect her comment in the interview quoted above that ‘I was brought up to look after my parents’ is telling, suggesting that in her own family the roles of parent and child were reversed.

The domestic realism of Drabble, Byatt, and Brookner focuses on women like themselves, highly educated and employed in the media or as writers and critics. In sharp contrast, the social realism of Pat Barker and Maggie Gee explores the lives of working-class women in the context of the postwar shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. The title of Barker’s novel Union Street (1982) is profoundly ironic, calling up the image of a close-knit working-class community only to undercut it by exposing the fractured society of the north-east of England in a period of economic decline. Setting up an implicit contrast with the working-class fiction of John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, Barker switches the focus from male to female experience and highlights an intensificat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Chronology
• Introduction: Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker
• Part I Women and Literary Culture
• Part II Feminism and Fiction: Evolution and Dissent
• Part III Gender and Genre
• Part IV Writing the Nation: Difference, Diaspora, Devolution
• Part V Writing Now
• Electronic Resources
• Select Bibliography
• Index