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Readable Mothers
| Article
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13108 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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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
... (1998 of 19958 Characters)
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