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April 14, 2002
ARTICLES: The female text
THE Women’s Library opened recently, a warm, welcoming, well-appointed space. As a result of a L4.2 million lottery grant, the country’s biggest collection of books, periodicals and artefacts relating to women’s literature and history is housed in the kind of place you generally see featured in the lifestyle pages of glossy magazines.
Carved cleverly out of an East End wash-house, there are wooden floors, hidden heating and the kind of lighting that can be relied on not to give you a headache. If you could afford it, and it was on the market, then you’d move in like a shot.
Anyone who ever visited the Women’s Library during its previous incarnation as the Fawcett Library will be awed by the contrast. Housed in a damp basement of London Guildhall University, the Fawcett was the kind of bleak chill-hole where you had to wear your coat in April and remember to bring your own sandwiches. The staff were charming and expert, but working in the Fawcett made the whole experience of being a woman and being interested in women’s writing seem like a dowdy and even slightly furtive activity.
There are those, though, who will be worried about the library’s gorgeous new clothes and the message they send. Just like those long-term Labourites who found themselves so used to being in opposition that 1997 saw them blinking crossly in the sunlight, so there are those who will find this economic validation of women’s writing and reading strangely disconcerting.
If the Women’s Library can attract this much mainstream funding, can afford to build a nice cafe doing pasta lunches with a vegetarian special, then where’s the fun in being a feminist?
This kind of thinking only reinforces the damaging belief that women, and women writers in particular, should not be interested in money and the pleasures and comforts that it brings. Ironically, it is the very fact that the pursuit of literature was traditionally viewed as a vocation rather than an enterprise that accounts for the fact that women were allowed to do it, and do it so early, in the first place. Jane Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot were publishing novels a century before women arrived at the Bar, the City or the boardroom. Eliot, certainly, made serious money out of her books but, like everyone else around her, she would have been appalled to think that she was in it for the cash.
But money talks and, if women are after a voice, then they need to hook up with it and not feel embarrassed in the process. The judging panel for this year’s Orange Prize, which included Fiona Shaw, was announced some weeks ago, with a flurry of press releases and a resulting burst of publicity. The reason, you can be sure, is not because the writers and readers of newspapers are passionately committed to the cause of women’s fiction and find themselves thrilled by the thought that another short-list of quality work will soon be on its way.
There are, after all, several established and prestigious awards for women writers, some of them going back 30 years, but you don’t hear much about them. No, the fuss that the six-year-old Orange Prize creates is entirely on account of its purse which, at L30,000, makes it Britain’s most valuable literary prize.
The world shouldn’t really be like this, of course. But, since it is, it seems sensible to try and make it work in one’s favour. The annual hoo-haa that accompanies the Orange Prize each June allows all kinds of debates that were previously confined to university seminar-rooms (scruffily underfunded ones at that) to get an airing in the culture at large.
Highly theoretical discussions about the difference between female and feminine texts, the position of the male reader and the validity of authorial intention get reworked into snappy articles on whether an all-women literature prize is patronizing and out of date. (During which you can be sure that some old campaigner will weigh in with the point that Jane Austen didn’t need the carrot of a ladies-only shortlist to get her scribbling.)
A certain kind of idealist feels that expensive initiatives like the Women’s Library and the Orange Prize — one funded mostly by public and charitable sources, the other by big business — demonstrate that post-feminism’s siren call has hauled women’s writing on to the rocks of compromise and contingency and left it stranded it there.
Not so. Having money means that people look and listen. And that, surely, is what all writers, female or otherwise, always need. — Dawn/Observer news service
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