Category: Diana Athill and Jean Rhys

A Year of Hidden Friendships

Published on 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
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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:

  1. 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.
  1. 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?
  1. Friendships between women are often neglected in favour of a female author’s intense or turbulent relationships with men.
  • On January 1st we will reveal an intimate friendship that fits into this category…
  1. The literary status of some of our writer heroines has suffered because their genre, style or subject matter was particularly associated with women.
  1. Some of the pairs shared an alliance so radical that others refused to believe that it could possibly have thrived.
  1. Other collaborations challenged core mythologies about female authors: the well-bred lady; the solitary eccentric; and the suffering genius.
  1. Popular perceptions of female friendship still struggle to allow for the kind of rivalry embraced by some of our writer forebears.
  1. Rumours of lesbian affairs sometimes actually seem easier for commentators to accommodate than the possibility of an intellectual partnership between women.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.

Memories of Jean Rhys: our interview with Diana Athill

Published on by Emily Midorikawa7 Comments

We recently wrote to one of this month’s profiled authors to ask if she would be willing to answer some questions about the late Jean Rhys. We were delighted when Diana Athill responded with a charming picture postcard and an invitation to come and visit her. December’s guest blog is the result of our conversation.

Jean Rhys in older age (1970s). Creative Commons licence
Jean Rhys in older age (1970s). Creative Commons licence

Diana Athill, now in her mid-nineties, has often spoken about how much she likes living at this residential home in north London. The greatest wrench she experienced when she moved out of her old flat in Primrose Hill was the need to give up a lifetime’s worth of books.

There is a single tall bookcase to the left of the chair where she is now sitting. Although it holds a great many more volumes than my similarly-aged grandparents had in their entire house, Athill’s collection previously ran into the thousands. In fact, the mammoth task of being forced to reduce it caused her such stress that she ended up spending a night in hospital.

From the chairs she’s instructed us to pull up – warning me apologetically that mine won’t be very comfortable – we count several titles by Jean Rhys, the author whose career Athill helped to resurrect through her work as an editor at André Deutsch.

Readers of our first December post will know what a long wait Athill had in store for her when Rhys told her she could have the final draft of Wide Sargasso Sea in ‘six or nine months’, and of her support and encouragement over the nine years it took for Rhys to finally deliver her manuscript.

Did Athill ever feel frustrated with her, we wonder. ‘I quite often felt frustrated’, she says, ‘but on the hand it became sort of a habit… She was fun to be with, you see, when she was being happy. And she was great as a writer.’

In relation to her writing, Athill remarks that Rhys was ‘steely’. ‘She knew exactly what she wanted and she was always dead right. In relation to ordinary life, I think she got stuck at about the age of eight.’

But because she could be charming, people wanted to come to her aid: ‘When she was young and a very, very pretty woman, she was rescued over and over again by helpful men. When she became older, she was rescued by nice women like me.’

When we ask Athill about her happiest memories of Rhys, she responds with laughter. She recalls the times when she stayed at Rhys’s cottage in Devon, saying that they were ‘hardly happy… but fun’.

Rhys once described the village she lived in as ‘a dull spot which even drink can’t enliven much’. Athill reserves comment on the geographical location, but she was clearly horrified by the small house itself: ‘When I first saw it I thought, how could anybody live here?’

But although she and others spent hours trying to find the author an alternative home, Athill tells us that Rhys would always say, in the end, ‘I think not. Better the devil I know.’

After the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea and republication of her earlier novels brought her greater financial stability, Rhys’s friends arranged for improvements to be made to the house, which resulted in it becoming warmer. The shed beside the building was converted into a spare room.

‘The funniest time really’, Athill laughs, was ‘when I went there and I was staying in this awful little shed’. It was a windy night and the surrounding bushes were banging against its outer walls. She woke up thinking: ‘Oh goodness, it’s making even more of a noise, and so I opened my eyes and what did I see? My handbag flying through the air out of the window!’

It would turn out that a thief with a hook on a long wooden rod had whisked her bag away. Athill leapt out of bed, but the boy vanished immediately.

First page of the introduction to Smile Please by Diana Athill, Jean Rhys's unfinished autobiography.
First page of Diana Athill’s introduction to  Smile Please, Jean Rhys’s unfinished autobiography.

When she told Rhys about the incident the next morning, the author’s reaction was: ‘“Oh good!” Because she’d been telling people that she’d heard suspicious people creeping about outside at night and they’d all told her she was imagining it.’

Rhys was famously paranoid – something she herself admitted. ‘Victim’ is another term readily associated with her, although this was something that used to make her angry. ‘There was a lot of violence in Jean’, Athill says. ‘She used to get very, very cross when people said she was a victim because she knew perfectly well, in her heart of hearts, that she was pretty fierce.’

Rhys’s literary ferocity combined with her helplessness in everyday matters created the circumstances for her collaboration with Athill – one of the most important in recent literary history.

Diana Athill’s collection of short stories Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is published by Persephone Books. Her selected memoirs Life Class is published by Granta Books.

A True Story

Published on 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.

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Creative Commons License

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.

What I’ve Learned from Emma Claire Sweeney

Published on by Emily MidorikawaLeave a comment

Drawing inspiration from Diana Athill and Jean Rhys, this month we take up the challenge to let each other know some of the things we’ve learned from the experience of regularly reading our friend’s writing.

The first time Emma Claire and I swapped pieces of work, we each printed out a short story we’d written, tucked it into an envelope fixed with airmail stamps and then waited with considerable trepidation for a postal reply.

I was living on the Japanese island of Shikoku at the time. Emma Claire, whose home had previously been a ninety-minute drive away, was now back in Britain, at her parents’ house in Birkenhead. A year had passed since we’d each confessed our secret ambitions to write, but it had taken us all this time to get up the nerve to show the other what we were working on.

View from Matsuyama Castle (the town where I used to live) by Jyo81 (Creative Commons licence)
View from Matsuyama Castle (the town where I used to live) by Jyo81 (Creative Commons licence)

Today, when Em and I exchange writing so frequently, this seems, on the one hand, extremely timid. But on the other, we probably did have some cause to worry – not just that our own efforts wouldn’t be good enough – but about how our friendship would be affected if we didn’t like each other’s prose styles.

Thankfully, the opposite turned out to be true, which is not to say that those early stories were much good. We were still grappling with the basics: how to pace a story, when to show and when to tell, and (in my case) how to write in grammatical sentences.

Nonetheless, Emma Claire’s use of language, infused with sensory detail, immediately pulled me in. In those early years, the stories she sent me were most often inspired by her experiences of living in Japan and her backpacking travels around South East Asia. I still easily recall a scene aboard a cramped Mekong river barge, ‘a garland of white jasmine petals and pink carnations’ swinging ‘hypnotically’ at the boat’s bow.

More recently, her fiction has centred on places closer to her roots. Like the novel she’s close to finishing, my favourite short story of hers is set in the seaside town of Morecambe. ‘The Taj Mahal of the North’, exemplifies so much that I admire about Em’s writing: the warmth of her voice on the page; her compassion for her characters; her ability to make the ‘ordinary’ seem suddenly startling and new.

Morecambe by Immanuel Giel (Creative Commons licence)
Morecambe by Immanuel Giel (Creative Commons licence)

I love her descriptions of the thriving resort of yesteryear – ‘the thick scent of the sea… the honky-tonk noises of the amusement arcades, and the couples sharing sundaes in the ice-cream parlour’. There’s a melancholy beauty to the Morecambe of today too, as seen through the eyes of the elderly male narrator who laments the demise of ‘the bath-houses and theatres’ where he spent his youth, ‘all standing derelict and converted into discotheques’.

This is writing that flows with ease. A reader would never know how many revisions it’s been through, how boldly its author has reshaped her story, removing characters, reordering scenes and, as Athill once recalled Rhys saying, being ready to ‘cut, cut, cut’.

Emma Claire’s example has encouraged me to stick with many a project that isn’t working yet and to take brave decisions when it comes to rewriting, completely replotting a novel for instance, or ditching a once-loved narrator: decisions that are made that bit easier when you know you’re guaranteed to have a writer friend beside you, every step of the way.

Diana Athill and Jean Rhys

Published on by Emily Midorikawa13 Comments

Prostitution, abortion, failed marriages and alcoholism: accounts of Jean Rhys’s story tend to paint her as a tragic femme fatale. But these facets make up only part of the colourful life that she’d weave so hauntingly into her fiction.

Of white Creole heritage, Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams was born in 1890 on the Caribbean island of Dominica. After emigrating to Europe in her late teens, she attended a girls’ boarding school in Britain, and later spent years living a financially precarious existence in bohemian Paris and London. This included periods as a chorus girl and artist’s model – experiences she’d later draw on in her lyrical early novels.

But works like Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight – which takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson – initially met with only limited success.

In middle age, Rhys retreated from the gritty glamour of her earlier existence. Now living in a remote country cottage, she upped her alcohol intake to a bottle of whisky a day and all but disappeared from the public’s consciousness.

Literature lovers owe a great debt to the editor Diana Athill for the part she played in putting Rhys back on the literary map. When Athill’s publishing house, André Deutsch, committed itself to Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s daring prequel to Jane Eyre, the author let the firm know that they could have the completed manuscript within six to nine months.

Image used with the kind permission of Penguin Books.
Image used with the kind permission of Penguin Books.

Six to nine months turned into a year. A year turned into five, six, and then seven… Throughout this period, Athill, along with her fellow editor Francis Wyndham, encouraged Rhys by letter, and neither of them ever lost their belief in her phenomenal talent.

Athill was already a published writer herself, of short stories and a first volume of memoir by that stage. Born close to two decades after Rhys, Athill, who’d grown up on a thousand-acre estate in the British county of Norfolk, came from a very different social background. But she too flouted convention: by going to Oxford University and then into a career in publishing, rather than settling down to married life as so many of her female friends had done.

The two, who’d been corresponding for seven years, had still never met when Rhys agreed to bring her almost-finished manuscript to London. They’d arranged to have lunch together, but, the day before, Athill received a panicked phone call from the manager of the hotel where the author was staying. Rhys had suffered a heart attack.

Instead of the planned champagne celebrations, she was rushed into hospital, and so the pair first really got to know each other during the following weeks of Rhys’s convalescence. Later, Athill would recall that the experience ‘with all the usual intimacies of nightdress washing, toothpaste buying and so on, plunged us into the deepest end of friendship’.

Although there had only been a few lines missing from Rhys’s manuscript at the time of her heart attack, it took her a further two years to complete it. But nine years after taking on the book as an editor, Athill travelled from London to Devon to collect Wide Sargasso Sea in person.

Its great success would bring Rhys the celebrated literary status that had always eluded her in her youth.

Athill, too, would go on to enjoy a hugely successful old age, with the release of several more books, including Stet, the memoir of her days as an editor, and the award-winning Somewhere Towards the End.

Image used with the kind permission of Granta Books.
Image used with the kind permission of Granta Books.

Activity

Diana Athill has said that she learned much about concision and clarity from Jean Rhys – lessons that she was able to draw on in her own writing. This month, we’ll let each other know the lessons we’ve learned from many years spent reading and commenting on each other’s work.