emmaclairesweeney

Nancy Hamilton and Helen Keller

Published on February 2, 2015December 30, 2014 by emmaclairesweeney8 Comments

Helen Keller was propelled to fame at a young age when she became the first ever deafblind person to be awarded a university degree, and she remains a household name to this day: a saintly figure canonized in Sunday school lessons and picture books.

As well as being a disability rights activist, however, she was also an author and outspoken speaker, whose subjects ranged from woman’s suffrage and the necessity of birth control to a brand of socialism considered so radical that she was monitored by the FBI.

Helen Keller. Image used with kind permission of the Perkins Museum. — Helen Keller. Image used with kind permission from the Perkins Museum.

Her best known relationships are those with her family and paid carers. The story of Anne Sullivan holding the young Keller’s hand beneath a water pump and spelling ‘w-a-t-e-r’ onto her palm has truly become the stuff of legend. But the adult Keller enjoyed the company of a wide circle of friends. While she was studying at Harvard, large numbers of fellow intellectuals flocked to her home, keen to engage in political debate, and she later struck up friendships with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mark Twain.

More subversively, she grew close to her neighbour: the actress and scriptwriter Nancy Hamilton, a ‘gay and chatty bachelor girl’, who boasted of drinking beer for breakfast and described herself as ‘the feminine Noël Coward’.

Hamilton was a writer and performer in the thirties and forties New York musical theatre world. Although she spent her professional life very much in the limelight, she had to keep her personal life shrouded in secrecy.

As a lesbian, she infiltrated the underground ‘sewing circle’ scene so that she could forge romances behind the veil of ‘respectability’. After a fling with the screen icon Katharine Hepburn, she later formed a relationship with the first lady of the American stage, Katharine Cornell. Although they would be lifelong partners, they felt forced to hide behind Cornell’s ‘lavender marriage’ with the gay director Gurthrie McClintic.

Nancy Hamilton (Creative Commons License)

Keller too was no stranger to sexual taboo and clandestine romance. Decidedly heterosexual, she displayed strong preferences for men from an early age and was eager to be found attractive by the opposite sex.

For her family and carers, though, it was unthinkable that a woman with profound disabilities should desire an erotic life. Sullivan was so disapproving of her charge’s love of romantic novels that Keller had to read her Braille copies in secret. And, when Keller’s mother discovered that a handsome young man was due to invigilate one of her daughter’s university exams, she insisted on a female replacement.

But when Keller was in her mid-thirties, Sullivan fell ill and an emergency ensued. Keller’s mother had to agree to a temporary male replacement, and so the socialist Peter Fagan, a twenty-nine year-old journalist, entered Keller’s household as her private secretary – his job to finger-spell the contents of letters, articles and books onto his employer’s open palm.

The pair soon fell in love and embarked on an intimate romance. Aware of the level of prejudice they faced, they got engaged in secret, filed for a marriage license and planned to elope.

But the newspapers got wind of this and Helen’s mother confronted the couple, her distress so great and her threats so strong that the lovers reluctantly parted ways.

Later in life, Keller had offers from filmmakers as famous as Truffaut all eager to make a documentary based on her autobiographical work. But she chose Hamilton, with her shared experience of illicit love, to write, direct and produce the biopic for which Eleanor Roosevelt would stump up much of the funds. Despite never having made a film before, The Unconquered – which wrote out Keller’s romantic history and contributed to the mythology of her as a saint – won Hamilton an academy award.

The nature of Keller’s disability meant that all her writing projects required her to work with others, making her expert in knowing when to step back and when to take the lead. Far from excluding her from intimacy, therefore, Keller’s disability provided her with some of the vital resources for collaboration, romance, friendship, and mutual support.

Activity

Helen Keller gave Nancy Hamilton the chance to try her hand at filmmaking. Inspired by them, this month we will encourage each other to try something new.

Conversations Spoken and Unspoken

Published on January 8, 2015January 6, 2015 by emmaclairesweeney3 Comments

I would like to say that our love of literature drew Emily and I together, or perhaps our mutual feminist ideals. But, if my memory serves me correctly, our very earliest conversations revolved around men.

Before boarding our flight to Tokyo to take up posts as English teachers, I’d spotted Emily and a bloke making their goodbyes. Since I was leaving my boyfriend behind in the UK, I suspected that Emily and I might share the experience of attempting to sustain long-distance relationships.

During many late-night conversations in the months that followed, I discovered that we had, in fact, made the opposite decisions: my boyfriend and I planned to keep going whereas Emily’s relationship had already come to an end.

In an attempt to move on, Emily was generally rather reticent about the man she’d left behind. Having seen him from afar at the airport, however, and sensing that her feelings still ran deep, I was curious and so tended to ask about him. As we gradually opened up about these men back home, our own friendship began to grow.

Many of these early conversations occurred towards the end of parties when most of our English teacher friends would embark on games like truth-or-dare and spin-the-bottle. When drunken nights began to get raucous, Emily and I often ended up drifting outside. I was loyal to my boyfriend back home and uninterested in hooking up with someone new. And, although Emily was officially single, I suspect that this was partially true of her too. Indeed, the goodbye I witnessed at Heathrow turned out only to mark a brief pause: after she completed her two years in Japan, they took up where they left off and have remained together ever since.

But the more I’ve got to know Emily, the more I’ve realised that there was also another reason why she preferred to absent herself when talk turned dirty: Emily is incredibly discreet. Over the years, this is one of the traits I have grown to admire most in my friend.

In truth-or-dare type scenarios, I have been known to reveal things about my life that should have remained private. The next day, I’ve invariably woken up regretting it. I can’t think of a single occasion when I’ve ever seen Emily make such a mistake.

I am grateful to Emily for the conversations we shared in the dark of our friends’ empty backyards: the confidences we traded about love and loss, and soon enough about literature and feminism too. But I am just as grateful for the conversations she saved me from indulging in: the private moments that remained private because of her.

Mary Lamb and Dorothy Wordsworth

Published on January 1, 2015January 27, 2015 by emmaclairesweeney6 Comments

In our round-up of Something Rhymed’s first year, we promised this month to reveal a friendship between two female authors that has been neglected in favour of these women’s relationships with famous men.

Mary Lamb and Dorothy Wordsworth, great writers themselves, are most often remembered because of their intense attachments to their brothers, essayist Charles Lamb and Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Their own fascinating friendship, preserved in their intimate correspondence, barely scrapes a mention in most literary histories.

And yet, like the men in their circle, Mary and Dorothy also hiked up the mountains around Grasmere, exchanging their thoughts on the natural world and trading ideas on each other’s poems.

When Dorothy visited London, Mary would welcome her into the small Inner Temple flat where she lived with her brother, and the two women would stay up talking late into the night.

The pair both shunned marriage in favour of devotion to their sisterly roles. The night before William’s wedding, Dorothy wore the ring that he had purchased for his betrothed and, when she gave it to him the following morning, he slipped it back onto her finger before taking it to the church. Dorothy did not attend the ceremony.

Stories of the relationship between the Lamb siblings suggest similar hints of the illicit. Mary, who suffered throughout her life from severe attacks of mental illness, had tragically stabbed their mother to death during her first breakdown. Charles promised to take care of his sister, thereby preventing her from being sent to Bedlam. They upheld their mutual pledge never to marry, instead committing themselves to each other ‘for better, for worse’ as Charles put it; writing in collaboration; and caring for their adopted child.

The women’s fraternal relationships, which had drawn them together, later threatened to split them apart. One of Mary’s breakdowns – so severe that she spent several weeks in an asylum – occurred after an overnight visit from Dorothy.

Charles, who felt that his sister’s mental health was reliant on a good night’s sleep, blamed the women’s late-night conversations for the onset of her illness. He therefore banned Dorothy from staying with them in future and declined her offer to bring Mary up to the Lakes.

But as soon as Mary recovered, she wrote a cheerful letter to Dorothy and the pair continued their friendship despite the restrictions imposed by Mary’s kindly but overbearing brother.

Dorothy Wordsworth (Creative Commons License)

Both of them eventually outlived their beloved siblings. In her dotage, Dorothy also suffered a loss of mental health – although different in nature from Mary’s lifelong illness.

As Dorothy’s grip on the present loosened she became immersed in memories of her youth. She took to reciting poems from the early Grasmere days: poems by the men we’ve come to think of as the great Romantics, but also her poems and those of her friend – the female Romantics whose lives and works have for too long been consigned to the shadows.

Activity

Inspired by Mary Lamb and Dorothy Wordsworth, this month we will write about some of our own late-night conversations.

A Year of Hidden Friendships

Published on December 29, 2014December 29, 2014 by emmaclairesweeney7 Comments

When we first launched Something Rhymed, a year ago now, concerned well-wishers expressed scepticism about whether we’d discover twelve pairs of historic female writer friends to profile each month over the course of 2014.

Thanks to our close-knit community of readers from around the globe, the reverse has in fact been true. You’ve helped us to unearth many more female collaborations than we could possibly have envisaged at the beginning of the year. With such a treasure trove of hidden friendships still to explore, we intend to keep sharing our findings here in 2015.

Old treasure chest — Creative Commons License

The collaborations we’ve explored so far were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring. And so, we’ve increasingly found ourselves asking why they have been consigned to the shadows.

To mark the end of Something Rhymed’s first year, here are our top ten ideas on why the friendships between some of our most famous female writers still have a cloak of secrecy about them:

Women writing in the past had more opportunities to converse in the parlour than in the pages of literary magazines.

For reasons of propriety, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe felt that she could not write an obituary in the Atlantic for her long-time friend and confidante, George Eliot.

The marked harmony and lifelong endurance of many of these writing partnerships cost them copy.

Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell bonded over their shared experience of infamy since they had both become mired in scandal for daring to pen biting social criticism. However, this enduring friendship often gets written off as a mere acquaintanceship. Could marked harmony also account for why so few of us have heard about the unlikely friendship between Ruth Rendell and Jeanette Winterson?

Friendships between women are often neglected in favour of a female author’s intense or turbulent relationships with men.

On January 1^st we will reveal an intimate friendship that fits into this category…

The literary status of some of our writer heroines has suffered because their genre, style or subject matter was particularly associated with women.

This is certainly true of Nora Lefurgey, the diarist, and L. M. Montgomery, the children’s writer.

Some of the pairs shared an alliance so radical that others refused to believe that it could possibly have thrived.

The friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings bravely transgressed racial divides, and Jane Austen and Anne Sharp defied the barriers between servant and employer.

Other collaborations challenged core mythologies about female authors: the well-bred lady; the solitary eccentric; and the suffering genius.

The alliance between Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson challenges the mythology of the poet as a crazed recluse, and the support Jean Rhys received from Diana Athill complicates her image as a suffering genius.

Popular perceptions of female friendship still struggle to allow for the kind of rivalry embraced by some of our writer forebears.

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, our first profiled pair, are a great example of this.

Rumours of lesbian affairs sometimes actually seem easier for commentators to accommodate than the possibility of an intellectual partnership between women.

Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby knew all about this.

Close friendships between girls might be all well and good but, after marriage, women have traditionally been expected to devote themselves primarily to their husband and offspring.

For this reason, Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton kept their friendship intensely private for many years.

Historically, female collaboration was considered subversive and therefore taboo.

And yet, the subversive nature of these friendships between women makes them powerful sources of transformation: Maya Angelou’s Nobel party for Toni Morrison, for instance, both celebrated the achievements of a fellow African American author and challenged their government’s failure to do so itself.

Working together on Something Rhymed this year, we have experienced some of the most jubilant moments in our own friendship (as well as some of the most fraught!). But, from Eliot and Stowe – who taught us the importance of candour – to Mansfield and Woolf – who showed us that rivalry can be a positive force – we are learning how to keep our own collaboration on course. And, with your support, we will continue to celebrate the secret sisterhood between our trailblazing forebears, finally bringing it centre stage.

A True Story

Published on December 15, 2014December 28, 2014 by emmaclairesweeney3 Comments

Emily and I have vivid memories of the moment when we first admitted that we were both secretly writing: the bowls of garlicky spaghetti we were eating; the acquaintance who unexpectedly showed up at the restaurant, putting a stop to our conversation; the way we picked up where we’d left off as we wandered through a shopping mall on our way home.

That discussion revealed some differences in our main motivations. Emily was driven by a desire to tell gripping stories whereas – ridiculously, in retrospect – that didn’t much interest me. My imagination was more fired by the psychology of characters and the cadences of individual lines.

A year later, when we gathered the courage to swap drafts, Emily sent me a fully formed story, while my pages comprised a series of vignettes with no discernible narrative. I still remember the first scene I read from Emily’s pen: a girl hunched over a sink in a drab Parisian hotel room, rinsing blood from her clothes while her boyfriend looked on. I still remember the tension that mounted as I turned the pages, the male character metamorphosing into a mosquito. The story ended with two possibilities hanging in the balance: perhaps the transformation had been real or perhaps it was the product of the girl’s unhinged mind.

Emily’s fiction has become increasingly stamped with her own unique style while still containing traces of those early literary influences: Jean Rhys, Haruki Murakami and Daphne du Maurier. But even those first efforts contained the beginnings of the melodic elegance and taut precision that I have come to so admire in Emily’s work. Many of her characters have lingered long in my mind: Loll, the Western nightclub hostess in Ōsaka’s Moonglow bar, who mixes cocktails for breakfast and wears long platinum blond wigs over her dark razor-cut hair; Nigel, the nylon-suited twenty-seven year-old, who is devoted to his elderly wife ‘Mrs Brewster’; Violet Wyndham, long-time principal of the Wyndham School of Ballet and Modern Dance, who wears stage makeup, dyes her hair flame red and cuts a controversial figure in the local town.

From Emily I learned that characters and cadences can only be enhanced by a good, old-fashioned, page-turning plot. But, much as she loves a great story, in her non-fiction she never gives way to the temptation to embellish or distort. ‘Is that quite right?’ Emily often asks when we are co-writing a literary feature, ‘Do we really believe that?’

When I came to write my PhD, I could often hear Emily’s voice in my head: ‘Is that a claim you’re prepared to stand by?’ she would ask. So, although she hasn’t read a word of my thesis, her influence is imprinted on every page.

The best story, Emily has taught me, is always the true story. It is the job of the non-fiction writer to draw out its inherent intrigue, tension and significance – something we endeavour to do on this site each and every time we unearth one of the hidden friendships of the women who went before us.

From Literary Protégée to Competition Rival: our interview with Madeline Miller

Published on November 17, 2014September 24, 2015 by emmaclairesweeney1 Comment

We were drawn to the friendship between Nora Lefurgey and L. M. Montgomery because it endured despite marked differences in their literary standings: while Anne of Green Gables propelled Montgomery to international fame, Lefurgey’s novel gathered dust in the proverbial drawer.

Of course, the prospect of rivalry does not end when both friends are published. Then there are questions of sales and reviews and awards. We’d been intrigued, therefore, when it was announced that both debut novelist, Madeline Miller, and multi award-winning author, Ann Patchett, had been shortlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize since Madeline had previously been one of a Ann’s protégées.

We met Madeline to ask her about the transition from literary mentorship to competition rivals.

Madeline explains that she had always been a great fan of the established author’s work, and that she counts Truth and Beauty, Ann’s memoir about her friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy, as one of her favourite books of all time.

Early in her career, Madeline had been thrilled to receive a glowing blurb from Ann for the publisher’s proof copy of her debut novel, The Song of Achilles. At this stage, Madeline had never met Ann, this novelist who had unexpectedly done her such a good turn. Evidently still touched by the older author’s generosity, she tells us about how they finally came face-to-face.

Fortuitously, Ann had been due to give a reading at Madeline’s local book store, and so Miller bought tickets, intending to introduce herself after the event. When, on the night, an audience member asked for a reading recommendation, Madeline was delighted to hear the celebrated author single out the forthcoming Song of Achilles for praise. She was even more surprised when Ann suddenly looked up, right into Madeline’s eyes, and introduced her to the crowd.

Ann proceeded to share the limelight with the younger author, who couldn’t fathom how she had been recognised. She jokes that she had been ready to put it down to Ann’s magical powers until her fiancé later confessed that he was the one to have pointed her out. ‘But she does have magical powers,’ Madeline laughs, ‘I stand by that!’

Ann’s kindness didn’t stop there. The pair struck up an email correspondence, and Ann generously shared the benefits of her own longer experience as a published author. Madeline is particularly grateful for Ann’s advice to steer clear of reviews, which give an exaggerated sense of both the positive and the negative, encouraging the writer to focus on the outward expressions of literary “success” rather than drawing on internal inspiration. Ann also shared her secret to a fulfilled writing life: There are times for writing and times for living, Madeline remembers Ann once saying, and one feeds the other.

The next time the pair met in person, it was on Ann’s instigation: she invited Madeline to read at Parnassus Books – the independent store that she co-owns in Nashville, Tennessee. It was there the two novelists discovered that they’d both made it onto the short list for the 2012 Orange Prize (now the Baileys Women’s Prize) – an award that recognises the work of female novelists.

It could have been a situation fraught with stress: although a game-changer for the debut author, Madeline now found herself pitted against her mentor.

But, instead, Ann, who had already won the prize back in 2002, took great pleasure in the opportunity this time to share the limelight with her protégée. When the date of the prize ceremony was announced, Ann realised that she couldn’t make it over to Britain at that time. She was glad that Madeline would be able to attend, and she even loaned her competitor one of her own outfits that she felt might be particularly suitable for the Orange Prize do: a beautiful dress of tangerine silk.

Madeline Miller wearing the dress she loaned from Ann Patchett.

When the judges revealed that they were awarding the prize to Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles, the young writer keenly acknowledged her indebtedness to her mentor in her acceptance speech. ‘I got to go and help represent her book as well,’ she says.

The competition seems to have actually strengthened their relationship. In fact, Madeline tells us that Ann was not the only one eager to congratulate her. The award, she says, ‘fostered a sense of collegiality’ amongst all its female nominees.

The friendship of Lefurgey and Montgomery taught us that creative rivalry can be endured, while the example of Miller and Patchett shows that it can even be enjoyed.

A shorter version of this interview was originally included in our feature in Mslexia Issue 57.

Diaries, Diversions and Double Beds

Published on November 10, 2014November 11, 2014 by emmaclairesweeney5 Comments

As a young woman, L.M. Montgomery, the woman who would later publish the famous Anne of Green Gables series, kept a giddy collaborative journal with her writer friend and housemate, Nora Lefurgey. Inspired by them, we have written a joint diary post about a trip we made together to Ilkley.

Emily: We get off to a slower-than-expected start when, on arriving at King’s Cross railway station, the board tells us our train has been cancelled. But it doesn’t ma GregPhoto.com tter: our Something Rhymed event at the Ilkley Literature Festival isn’t until tomorrow – we’ve allowed ourselves an extra day for lots of rehearsing – and even though we’ve arranged to meet our friends at the town’s Playhouse bar later, we still have plenty of time.

Plus, with the two of us together, these things are always all right; they would be even if we were cutting it fine.

An hour or so later, we are on the train making our journey north. I plan to work on a blog post that’s set to go live tomorrow, while Emma Claire puts the final touches to an article we’ve written for Shooter Lit Mag. But we keep talking, and so we don’t get as much done as we’d have liked.

Emma Claire: The article is about Emily Dickinson, and so I have been reading her letters and am itching to share my findings with Em: the only friend who I know for sure will find Dickinson’s love life as fascinating as I do. Despit GregPhoto.com e at least one proposal of marriage; a darkly mysterious correspondence with someone she called ‘Master’; and a late-life erotic liaison with a man eighteen years her senior, Dickinson famously never married. And yet, as an adolescent, she had harboured such high hopes of romance. I can’t help disturbing Em from her blog post to share this snippet from one of Dickinson’s letters: ‘I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17^th year. I don’t doubt that I will have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how shall I delight to make them await my bidding and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision’. Who would have thought that such a sociable creature would have become mythologised as a crazed recluse? GregPhoto.com

Emily: When the man with the refreshments trolley reaches us he says ‘What can I get you, girls?’ We wonder for how long people will keep calling us that. We are almost thirty-five.

Emma Claire: Now that Emily has pointed it out, I keep noticing people’s tendency to refer to us as ‘girls’. We got to have a brief chat with Edna O’Brien at t GregPhoto.com he Small Wonder Festival recently and, although we were there in our role as lecturers accompanying our New York University students, she greeted us affectionately with the words: ‘Two girls!’ Both with Edna O’Brien and with the man on the train, I found myself quite enjoying the image of us as young friends – perhaps because, in both cases, their tones seemed wistful rather than patronising. Life’s thrown quite a lot at Emily and me during the dozen or so years since we first met, beating much of our youthful naivety out of us. And yet, now that we’re far closer to forty than twenty, I feel as if my friendship with Emily has helped me not only to mature but also to prolong my girlhood.

Emily: Through the window, we pick out places that bring back lots of memories: towns I remember from days that seem distant, when I used to commute to London from my old flat in Leeds every week. As we pull into Grantham, Emma Claire says she always recalls switching trains here, stepping down to take the much slower service to the village in Lincolnshire where I lived in my mid-twenties. Ever since I first got to know her, Em has been a regular house guest.

Emma Claire: During the years when I was living in central London and Emily and her partner were moving between various towns and villages, my visits to them always felt like mini-holidays. By the time I reached Grantham, I would already have begun to unwind. My memories of those weekends are full of small pleasures: picking rocket from t GregPhoto.com heir back garden; mixing gin with triple sec and a squeeze of lemon; shopping for sushi-fresh fish in their local market.

Since they moved to London and we started SomethingRhymed.com, I have become a far more frequent overnight guest – something that particularly struck me this weekend when Emily and her partner came over to my place for breakfast on their way to other friends. It had been five years since Emily’s partner had visited my house, and yet these days he welcomes me into theirs on an almost weekly basis.

Emily: When we arrive in Ilkley at last, we find our hotel with minimal trouble. Phone maps have made everything easier than it used to be, but it’s still far from unusual for us to get lost, particularly when we are chatting as we wander.

Through the front door, in the narrow corridor, Emma Claire, who’s made the GregPhoto.com two-night booking, gives her name to the man on reception. He nods, but seems strangely reluctant to show us to our room, and so we wait with our bags while he disappears out the back. We can hear the hum of his voice. He seems to be trying to find someone, anyone, else to show us to where we will be sleeping.

When he emerges at last, unsuccessful apparently, he leads us up the stairs. In the room, we see a large bed for two. The man talks us hurriedly through the facilities, his eyes focused away.

Once Emma Claire has explained that she’d requested a twin, our host visibly relaxes. He insists on showing us to three different rooms, asking us to take our pick. On our own again, with the door closed, we laugh about what’s just happened.

Emma Claire: But GregPhoto.com we also feel that we’ve been given an insight into what it could be like for gay couples on their travels, and the way that such situations could become far more tiresome than funny. But we keep on laughing, wondering if there’ll ever come a day – now that we’re really no longer girls – when we might feel flush enough to book separate rooms.

Emily: It’s not long before we have to get back out to meet Gail and Irenosen, also in town for the festival. The sky is dark and brooding and we are walking along the sloping streets, neither of us entirely sure where the Playhouse is, despite having been to Ilkey before – and in my case to the theatre itself.

Over the years, Em and I have got ourselves lost in so many locations: along the country roads of Japan’s Ehime Prefecture, circling the streets of Barreiro in Portugal, and on several nights out in London. This time, though, we keep up today’s earlier form and find our way fairly quickly – not that it would have mattered if we hadn’t, not really, with the two of us together.

Maggie Gee and Salena Godden: the Innocence Under the Armour

Published on October 29, 2014September 24, 2015 by emmaclairesweeney11 Comments

A shared sense of a female literary tradition fired the epistolary alliance between this month’s profiled writers: the reserved George Eliot and the ebullient Harriet Beecher Stowe. And so we asked authors Maggie Gee and Salena Godden to tell us about their similarities and differences, and the role in their friendship of the written word.

The Road Across the Wolds 1997, oil on canvas 48 x 60″ by David Hockney Creative Commons License

Maggie: When I first met Salena I found her lively and funny but also quite dauntingly and dazzlingly young – she’s a quarter of a century younger than me. When I heard her perform for the first time, reading a piece of short prose that was as much poetry as story, I really sat up. Wow – she could write – my memory of that piece is of a wide golden field: a sort of dizzy sweep of perspective; and realizing that she was unafraid to be lyrical about the world – a risk most writers won’t take in a culture where irony is king.

I think we share that innocent eye. I do satire but the presiding vision I have is love. I think that’s true of Salena too, in among the outrageous humour and belly laughs. And maybe we recognized that innocence in each other, though we each in our different ways have shells that prevent most people from seeing it. I knew Salena would like the radiant David Hockney Yorkshire landscape show at the Royal Academy in 2012: we went together (it was about the 9^th time I had seen it actually!).

Salena: I’ll never forget that day we met and went to see that Hockney exhibition, in my memory it is a film. We had a sunny afternoon tea and shared ideas and gossip. Afterwards I remember walking all the way home, through Regents Park and up into Kentish Town, utterly inspired by the colours and the art, but mostly the company, the listening and the sharing and the fantastic conversations we had that afternoon.

I think we share a love of language, colour and light as much as we share a capacity to imagine the worst and the darkest of outcomes. I also think both of us have had to work (and still do work) bloody hard and have hardly ever taken no for an answer. I might be the naughty one or more hedonistic of the two of us, but there is nothing wilder than having an idea and digging your heels in, there is nothing braver than keeping on keeping on, especially when the chips are down or the odds are against you. I think we share an old fashioned sense of fair play, a willingness to fight your corner and a mischief – these are some of the things I’d say we share. If we had gone to the same school I would have probably nicked sweets and pens from Woolworths to give to Maggie to woo her to be my friend and tell me all about writing.

Maggie: How are we different? Well, my father stuck around and gave me different problems to Salena, whose father left. I had more formal educational chances, and she has had more crazy fun. She sang, for heaven’s sake, and had two bands (at least), and ran cool things like The Book Club Boutique! What did I get: degrees. Oh, and she still writes, performs and publishes poetry, whereas my early drive to write poems compressed itself into prose. She’s a fine, bitter-sweet poet – I wish I had written her new collection, Fishing in the Aftermath: it’s intimate and wild and tender, but the words are worked and reworked like a Toledo blade.

Salena: My first impression of Maggie was of a sensation of being drawn into her fantastic inquisitive mind, what I mean is, she asks the most interesting questions of her surroundings and coerces people into revealing their mysteries. It is important to question and notice the tiny details in things, but these moments seem to spring golden when you are talking with Maggie.

When we first met back in 2002, I felt I was a rough boozy ruffian next to her, I was in awe. I could tell right away that Maggie was quick and smart, she uses language beautifully, there’s a magnetic pull and a magic in Maggie, she’s a bold heart and a true believer.

Maggie: I think we really like each other’s work. I read an early draft of Springfield Road, her brilliant memoir, which has just come out this summer. I was so pleased when she asked me to introduce her at the launch.

Salena: I took Springfield Road to Maggie feeling that I could trust her with it. My confidence was pretty shaken at the time, but I knew Maggie would ‘get it’ after I finished reading her beautiful and vivid memoir My Animal Life. Memoir is another kind of writing, you have no armour: you just have your truth and your ghosts.

Maggie: We both had problems with the same very big, mainstream publisher. Maybe my cynical view of how big publishers operate was helpful (my being lyrical about human life does not preclude being pretty cynical about most commercial publishing): and I could tell her, hand on heart, that I thought Springfield Road was a stunning piece of writing just as it was.

Salena: It was Maggie’s letters and words of encouragement that gave me the confidence I needed to persevere. Then I met John Mitchinson and Rachael Kerr who signed me on the Unbound label and together we all successfully crowd funded Springfield Road. My memoir would still be in a box under my bed if it weren’t for Maggie.

Maggie: Looking at the other side of the coin, Salena gave me a shot of new creative life by inviting me into a world of young writers and artists that I loved and felt happy in. Also, when I recently got a slightly demented Guardian review, Salena was the first to tweet in support.

Salena: As for that review, it missed the point, the romance, beauty and comedy in the book. I loved the concept of Virginia Woolf In Manhattan. I ate it all up, loving every imaginative word and page, it made me laugh and cry out loud. I mean imagine getting drunk with Virginia Woolf, what a wicked and wonderful dream that is…

Maggie: At significant moments in life, I have received wonderful long emails from Salena that are full of the texture of her days. They probably took a few seconds to write, read as naturally as breathing and are cousins of her confessional poems. Then I’ll write back in a kind of mirror writing. I notice my emails always reflect the style of the email that comes to me. Yes, Salena’s a very stylish lady, as well as a sweet one.

Salena: Maggie’s letters are a light beaming out of my inbox. She is a true comrade. It’s a funny old game writing, as you know, it is a lonely and competitive sport. Maggie has been so generous. I don’t know what I would have done without her this past decade or so. Some people bring out the best in you, they make you want to do good and aim high and dream bigger and Maggie Gee is that person to me.

Maggie Gee’s latest novel, Virginia Woolf In Manhattan, was published by Telegram Books.

Salena Godden’s latest book is a memoir, Springfield Road, published by Unbound. Her monthly event, The Book Club Boutique, will be launching its new residency at Vout-O-Reenee’s with a Burning Eye Books party on November 5th.

In Praise of the Spinster

Published on October 22, 2014October 21, 2014 by emmaclairesweeney5 Comments

When we decided on this month’s challenge, I knew straight away which of our profiled authors I would like to raise from the dead.

Even Jane Austen couldn’t sway me from beyond the grave, although it was a Wordsworth £1 classic edition of Emma that, as a young teenager, initiated me into the world of female authorship. I don’t need to conjure up Austen’s ghost to enjoy her dry humour, and her face – with which everyone in Britain will become intimately acquainted once the new £10 banknote is issued – was recorded for posterity by her sister Cassandra.

Although Austen’s family destroyed much of her correspondence, the writer with whom I would love to make contact is far more of an enigma: all her literary works have been lost and her portrait was likely never painted.

Anne Sharp, the amateur playwright so valued by Austen, has been silenced for centuries. The intelligent, spirited voice of this governess in the employment of the Austen family has survived only in snippets. But when she does speak up across the ages, for example in Austen’s records of Sharp’s feedback, her astute critical faculties make us sit up and take note: here was someone who read with sensitivity and, despite the mighty class divide, felt at liberty to express her thoughts.

Perhaps it was this outspokenness that led Austen’s nephew to describe Sharp as ‘horridly affected but rather amusing’ – a phrase that brings to mind a neighbour’s portrayal of Austen as the ‘silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly’.

Like Austen, Sharp never did wed although marriage would have been the surest path to financial security. Unsurprisingly, little was recorded of Sharp’s romantic history. But we do know that her famous friend turned down a proposal from a wealthy man, and engaged in at least two other romantic liaisons. Yet the pernicious myth persists that Austen was too plain to attract suitors.

I once dragged a new squeeze to see the original portrait of Austen during a first date at the National Portrait Gallery. We failed to find anything unattractive in her appearance and I couldn’t help but feel that her alleged plainness would never have caught on had she not remained single. Cassandra actually described Austen as ‘triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom’ – an image that complicates the prevailing notion of her romantic suffering.

Talking about Jane Austen and Anne Sharp at this year's Ilkley Literature Festival — We talked about Jane Austen and Anne Sharp at this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival

While Sharp’s single lifestyle would also have afforded her certain freedoms, it must have been a hard slog too – much more so than for Austen, whose only household responsibility was the preparation of tea and toast. After years of earning her crust as a governess for various wealthy families, she managed to set up her own boarding school in Everton. She spent the rest of her days in this area, living in York Terrace – a relatively prosperous street with views across the River Mersey to my hometown of Birkenhead.

I would love to learn from this working woman how she managed to do so well from such humble beginnings, and whether she ever considered giving up her independence and her toil for the perhaps easier option of marriage.

Perhaps my subconscious had been trying to tell me something when I dragged that poor date to view the painting of Austen: it was, in part, her independence that allowed her to pen those much-loved novels warning against ill-judged marriages. And it is her friend Anne Sharp – whose portrait I will never see – whose example reminds me that it was possible, even then, for a woman to make her way, ‘rejoicing in her own freedom’.

Sisters Under the Skin

Published on September 29, 2014September 27, 2014 by emmaclairesweeney3 Comments

One of the unexpected pleasures afforded by running this site is the chance to speak about female literary friendship on stage as well as write about it on screen, so Emily and I are particularly looking forward to our October 15th Festival Fringe event at the Ilkley Playhouse.

On account of their skin colours, author friends Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings could not have appeared together in their local theatre: an injustice that we find particularly resonant since we too are from different ethnic backgrounds.

Gainesville Theatre, Florida, was not desegregated until the late 1960s, decades after Hurston and Rawlings became friends. When these authors met in 1942, in many parts of the United States the pair could not have sat in the same railroad waiting room, ridden the same bus, sunbathed on the same beach, eaten at the same restaurant table or drunk from the same water fountain.

Demonstration in front of a segregated theatre in Florida in 1962. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/4528 — Demonstration in front of a segregated theatre in Florida in 1962.
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/4528

What’s more, Florida was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. The state’s barbarous white supremacists lynched more people per capita than anywhere else in the country. Just two years into Hurston’s friendship with Rawlings, a fifteen year old black boy was brutally murdered in the city of Live Oak in Florida for having dared to pen a love note to a white girl. Willie Howard wrote in his Christmas card to Cynthia Goff: ‘I love your name. I love your voice. For a S.H. [sweetheart] you are my choice’. For this, he was kidnapped along with his father, driven to the banks of the Suwanee River, his hands and feet bound, and instructed either to jump or be shot. His father was forced to watch at gunpoint while his son drowned.

Played out against such a vicious backdrop of racism, the friendship between Hurston and Rawlings was radical indeed. Rawlings’s love and admiration for Hurston caused her to confront her own deeply entrenched prejudices, and both women ended up lending their support to racial equality campaigns. However, their efforts did not meet with a huge level of success during their lifetimes. The racism that their friendship defied hounded them even in death: both women’s bodies were buried in segregated cemeteries.

Thankfully, we have never faced racially motivated opposition to our friendship. Some people actually consider us so alike that they have even mistaken us for sisters. And yet, our own society is far from colour blind. The UK’s literary scene is a case in point. Just 4% of people in the publishing industry in England and Wales are Black/Asian/Minority/Ethnic (BAME), while 14% of the population of England and Wales are BAME (UK 2011 census). Such lack of diversity among the gatekeepers has resulted in a woeful lack of publishing opportunities for BAME authors.

We are particularly proud that our Ilkley Festival Fringe event follows the SI Leeds Literary Prize ceremony, since this award ‘aims to act as a loudspeaker for Black and Asian women’s voices, and a platform to discover exciting new talent, from a group largely under-represented on our bookshelves’.

Emily was a runner-up in 2012, so we also have personal reasons for feeling delighted to continue our relationship with Soroptimist International. And yet we cannot help but wish for a world in which their prize would be unnecessary – a world in which all our sisters’ voices would stand an equal chance of getting heard.

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