Tag: non-fiction

The truth is buried in there somewhere

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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft

I originally got this book for the Year of Feminist Classics project, but when they actually discussed it back in January I was only about 20 pages in. And then I put it aside for four months. The thing is, while being a hugely important and interesting work, this one is pretty tough to read. Or at least, I thought so.

First up, why was it hard to read? Well, it’s rambling and repetitive to such an extent that even my abridged Penguin Great Ideas edition of 132 pages felt too long. The language is as archaic as you might expect of 1792 and the society to which it refers is so long gone that it’s only recognisable from old novels. This also means that a lot of her arguments and the things she wishes to change have already changed, the fight has been won, so you could argue that it’s no longer relevant.

And yet, it is also eye-opening and indeed educational to be reminded how different society was, how unequal the sexes, and therefore how much progress has been made. Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing against the assumption that women are inherently weak, incapable, over-emotional beings with a natural love of dresses and pretty things; that men are inherently superior and women their slaves. This is not the view of one or two lone misogynists but that of most people in the western world at the time.

Wollstonecraft addresses herself to men and keeps all of her arguments abstract. She does not single out great women of history to look up to and indeed her comments about queens not being the equal of kings make me suspect that she did not subscribe to the now widely held view that Elizabeth I was a fine example of a woman proving herself in a man’s world. What Wollstonecraft does do is paint a series of caricatures of women who have been ruined by their upbringing or society or both.

This text does not set out any rules for women to follow to improve themselves, besides a brief attack on reading novels (which she distinguishes from literature). The primary point seems to be a plea to the powers that be – all male, of course – to at least try providing equal education for girls as for boys, so that women can prove by themselves that their silliness is a result of lack of education first and foremost.

Though education is her primary goal, there are also social changes to be made that are harder to resolve, and indeed Wollstonecraft does more describing how the current state of things is bad than suggesting how it can be changed. She appeals to what men might want in a woman – when sexual passion dries up, don’t they want an interesting, educated companion to share their life with? Don’t they want their children to spend their formative years with a strong, sensible, intelligent caregiver? Don’t they want to share some interests and hobbies with their life partner, to make marriage more enjoyable?

One point that Wollstonecraft makes is that while men have various hobbies and pastimes, women have only one – their appearance – which has a derogatory effect in numerous ways. And this really rang true for me because from what I remember, though it’s been a while, magazines for girls are about that one thing and basically nothing else – how to attract boys, what celebrities are wearing, how to pluck your eyebrows… How on earth this stuff can be regurgitated weekly astounds me but it was and probably still is. Yet lads mags, between the topless/bikini-clad ladies, have articles about cars, gadgets, films, sport. They’re still clichéd topics, sure, but at least there’s some variety, some looking outward to the world. It’s depressing how little has changed since 1792 when you look at details like that.

The passage that struck me the most was related to the above but not quite making the same point. Wollstonecraft argues that men who encourage women to be flirts who obsess over their appearance create women who are too physically unfit to be of any use in the bedroom or in childbirth. Now there’s a point I can agree with!

I’m glad I ploughed my way to the end and I can see why it’s considered important, but this was too poorly structured and hard to read for me to call it great.

First published 1792.

See also: reviews by Amy Reads and Emily of Evening All Afternoon. If you’re interested in Mary Wollstonecraft, it’s well worth taking a look at the excellent project A Vindication of the Rights of Mary.

What women writers want

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A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf

I was inspired to finally pick up this book by Amy Reads and her part in the Year of Feminist Classics project. It turns out, now I look at the reading schedule, that they’re not discussing this title until May, but I’d been meaning to read it for years anyway, and I can always go back and discuss it with them in three months’ time!

I’m so glad I finally read this book. It is truly brilliant. I struggled a little with the Woolf books I had to read for my degree, but this is actually a reworking of two speeches she gave at women’s colleges in October 1928 and therefore has a rather different style from her fiction. For me it was much more accessible and approaches the topic of feminism from an angle that I am very interested in – women and fiction.

Of course, Woolf being Woolf, she doesn’t approach the subject in an entirely straightforward manner. Instead she begins with her answer to a question as yet unvoiced and then invents the character of a woman writer to illustrate how she arrived at this answer, including all of the research and ruminating along the way. But bizarre as that sounds, it’s a fascinating and intelligent study of its subject with so many quotable passages that my copy is now covered in bright yellow sticky notes.

The conclusion of this extended essay is so famous that it is not only the title but is also repeated in red text on the front cover of my edition: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” These days that may seem like an odd statement but it’s worth remembering, as Woolf ably illustrates, that at the time of writing there were very few colleges in the UK that accepted female students and almost no scholarships or bursaries for them; women were not allowed in Oxbridge libraries unaccompanied, even if they were students there; a woman’s property and wealth legally became her husband’s upon marriage; and even upper class women were very unlikely to have a study or sitting room of their own.

“The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up [a newspaper] could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy.”

Woolf counts the four great women writers as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot (which was interesting of itself to me, that 80 years ago the same names should have been considered “great” as now, or maybe we consider them great because we have been told they are for 80+ years) and looks carefully at how being a woman influenced each of them. In Jane Austen she sees the greatest influence of having had to write in a shared sitting room, as so much of Austen’s work is set in those very rooms, but she also bestows great praise on Austen for having such an honest, undeniably female voice. Charlotte Brontë, Woolf says, was a better wordsmith but also more given to expressing discontent with her lot in life, giving her heroines speeches about being held back from the world that jar with the rest of the novel.

Woolf finds women depicted by men, in fiction and non-fiction, wholly unsatisfactory, partly because men tend to depict women as hollow featureless objects but also because a lot of what they do show is unrealistic idealism. In truth, through most of history women have not been nearly as well educated or as wordly as men.

“A very queer composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history…some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”

Women depicting women, however, can actually do it properly, creating real personalities, likes, dislikes, good qualities and bad ones. Woolf describes her delight when reading, in a not particularly good book by a woman writer, about the friendship between two women – a subject she declares is at every woman’s heart and yet never depicted yet by any man. (She makes a few generalisations like this. I have to presume that, though reasonably well read, she had not read every book ever written and therefore an exception to this statement may well exist.)

In the face of such adversity, Woolf shows great admiration for those pre-20th-century women who did defy convention and write, even those who did it in secret, but especially those who published their work like Aphra Behn (another name I studied at university). She urges the women she is speaking to – women who have at least a little money, some education and most likely a room of their own – to continue this tradition, to find their own voice uninfluenced by men. She complains that her reading has become monotonous with so many men’s voices, so much male influence, and expresses a hope that the time will come when readers will think her rant out of date.

She closes with the sentiment that in “another century or so” women writers will have found their voice. I like to think that, while the gender equality fight is still very much on, in writing at least women have found an equal footing. I don’t know how the numbers compare of books published by men and women, or indeed books sold, or literary prizes won, and if they are even now it’s probably a very recent development, maybe even in the last ten years. But the world has changed drastically from the one Woolf knew and I like to think she would be proud of women today, especially women writers.

First published 1928.
I read the Penguin Great Ideas edition, published 2004.

UPDATE: If you’re interested, you can check out the Year of Feminist Classics discussions about this title here and here.

A different normality

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Non-fiction
by Chuck Palahniuk

A few years back I considered myself a big fan of Palahniuk’s novels. Then either they got worse or my reading tastes changed. Either way, this collection of his essays, many of them previously published in newspapers and magazines, lay around unread until I had an urge to read more non-fiction and this seemed to fit the description well!

While I may have gone off his fiction, I still love Palahniuk’s writing style. His short punchy sentences, repetition and colloquial phrasing break all sorts of rules about writing and grammar but they work. He can be very critical of the world but he can also be very sweet in his genuine interest in people, often people no-one else is interested in. He’s led an odd life, some of which he talks about in these essays, and that has no doubt coloured his view of the world. I don’t admire him for doing strange, sometimes dangerous things, but I do admire him for working with dying people, for telling stories that deserve to be told, for openly analysing his reasons for writing what he does.

If you’ve read any of Palahniuk’s fiction these essays will make sense to you. He collects facts and stories about real people and files them away for later use in a novel. Literally, it turns out. He has a wall of filing cabinets full of this stuff. The essays range from moments in his own life, to people he’s met casually, to people he has deliberately researched. There’s the crew of a US navy submarine, three men who built their own castles, a woman who trained her dog in search and rescue, professional wrestlers. There’s Palahniuk’s experiences of having his novel turned into a Hollywood film, of having an annoying faux psychic woman genuinely unearth a troubling childhood memory, of dealing with his father’s murder.

My favourite pieces were the more positive ones, which were mostly about writing. Palahniuk’s career took off when he attended a creative writing class and he writes movingly about the greatness of his mentors and some of his favourite writers. His cynicism is still there but it’s aimed at himself and not the subject.

I didn’t enjoy every essay. Palahniuk does his research thoroughly and in some cases that meant trawling through paragraph after paragraph on a subject I don’t care about, like wrestling or demolition derbies, but the essay as a whole is always worth reading because somewhere in there will be a gem of a portrait or observation, a really real person saying or doing something that makes you stop and think.

These essays don’t get as dark as his novels do, possibly because they’re mostly written for the wider audiences of magazines with editors who don’t want to publish Palahniuk’s darkest thoughts. But they’re clearly written from the perspective of a person who has dark thoughts, who questions the acceptance of any “normality”, who has frankly been through some shit. It’s interesting stuff.

Published 2004 by Jonathan Cape.

The value of books

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Books v. Cigarettes
by George Orwell

This is part of the Great Ideas range, yet another excellent and also stylish set of paperbacks from Penguin that are either excerpts from longer works or collections of shorter essays, as this one is. They’re small and affordable (unless like me you find you want to buy the whole set – there’s 80 of them so far!) and well designed. And from what I can tell from my sample size of two, the contents have been carefully and skillfully chosen.

It would be hard to go wrong with George Orwell, mind, which may be why Penguin already has three books of his writings in this range. Everything I have read by Orwell – fiction, autobiography, letters, newspaper columns – has been exceptionally well crafted, intelligent but also interesting and accessible. He was very open about things like money, social background, politics and patriotism, which are things we can all relate to and yet seem so rarely to be discussed.

I picked this book up in the wonderful Toppings bookshop in Bath, one of that now rare breed of independent bookshops that are bigger than a shoebox and have a genuinely good selection of books, which was appropriate because two of the selected essays deal with buying and selling books, and I found Orwell’s thoughts on the subject and expectations for its future fascinating. In the opening essay, he compares his spending on books with his spending on tobacco, to see whether there is merit in the claims he often hears that books are too expensive for “normal” people. With some lengthy reasoning and a little maths he concludes that this is rubbish and the true reason that people don’t buy books is that they consider reading to be a dull pastime, not the cost. I wonder what he would have made of the breaking of the Net Book Agreement.

Which brings us to his second essay, on bookselling. Orwell worked in a bookshop for a time and makes some lively, often caustic, observations of regular customers that he remembers. But what I found most interesting were his closing remarks. First, that “any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop…combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman” – a surprisingly shortsighted comment from the man who wrote 1984. And second, his description of how working in a bookshop made him fall temporarily out of love with books, almost made them repulsive to him. That was a real surprise to me and I’d like to hear from any booklovers who have worked in a bookshop to see if they felt the same.

The other essays deal with book reviewing (which he is most vicious about, sadly), patriotism (he was just too young to fight in the First World War and felt it very keenly), free speech, his experience of a particularly awful French hospital and his time at boarding school (an endlessly fascinating topic to me, and one that is of great interest here because he was a scholarship boy, so he was an outside observer to the high end of the class system that dominates such schools). It’s a truly excellent selection of writing and I doubt it will be long before I buy more books from this series.

Published 2008 by Penguin. Essays originally published between 1936 and 1952.
Number 57 in the Great Ideas series.
ISBN 978-0-1410-3661-8

In the words of the late great Mr Peel

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The Olivetti Chronicles: Three Decades of Life and Music
by John Peel

John Peel isn’t remembered primarily for his writing but it’s something he did a lot of. He wrote almost-weekly columns for 30 years, for various publications from Disc to the Observer to BIKE. He wrote in much the same manner as he spoke on the radio – warm, funny and not shy of a little vitriole.

The writing in this collection was selected by his family and his son William writes a touching introduction explaining the project, the title (Peel wrote almost exclusively on an old Olivetti typewriter) and his own reaction to his father’s writing (“well observed and entertaining”). The topics are pretty varied. Obviously music is well covered (classical as well as rock) but there’s also football, television, trips abroad, family life, friendship, comedy, hangovers and some ramblings that don’t seem to have any real subject at all. Not that that matters.

There is a difference in tone between Peel’s writing from the early 1970s – which is often surreal and generally has him referring to himself in the third person – and the writing from the last ten years of his life – which tends to be more sentimental. But it is all undeniably Peel, with a love of music and his family and friends shining above everything else.

The gig reviews are a treat. They are not something I usually enjoy reading unless I am familiar with the band in question but Peel’s reviews are a wonder. He invokes the atmosphere of the crowd, the quality of the venue and the performances with astonishing vividness. Whether enthusing, pouring scorn or withholding judgement, the depth of his music knowledge is clear and you feel sure you would agree, had you been at the same gig. In fact, to test this (and also because I was a fan of his Radio 1 show some years ago) I compiled a Spotify playlist of records that he recommends in these columns. Hopefully it will work if you click here (though there’s a chance it won’t outside the UK – apologies for that). It’s a pretty mixed bag, as anyone familiar with John Peel would expect. As he says himself, “The programmes I do for Radio 1 have always been (roughly) based on the principle that what you’re buying, listening to and enjoying is all very well but there exists also something else, less favoured, but equally worthy of your attention.”

The funniest columns are, in my view, those in which he lays into something – be it a famous person, TV show or reader’s letter – with gusto. Peel was not a man to pussyfoot over opinions. He compares Eurovision to a long-drawn-out car crash, describes John Denver and the Carpenters as “cake-mixers” and Billy Joel as “Elton John without the costume, the sense of the preposterous or the tunes”. But this is balanced by the almost-as-harsh words he has for himself: fat, boring and bald being his favoured adjectives.

Peel’s astonishing honesty and openness made him an excellent writer, if his grammar and typing skills did not. It was a real joy to hear his voice again and I will definitely be dipping back into this book from time to time.

Published 2008 by Bantam Press