Tag: Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell

The Maternal Line

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When we began to work on this month’s challenge to create a ‘family tree’ showing the literary ancestral lines that we’ve traced on the site, we soon realised that we couldn’t possibly accommodate all the intertwined connections between the forty-five authors we’ve profiled so far.

Instead, we decided to focus on the literary forebears and successors of just four of our favourite novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. You’ll need to click on the image and zoom in to read it.

The Maternal Line

Our literary family tree includes the following connections:

Jane Austen

  • George Eliot re-read Austen novels prior to writing her own.
  • Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes, was a vocal fan of Austen.
  • Charlotte Brontë couldn’t understand what Lewes saw in Austen’s work.
  • Virginia Woolf called Austen ‘the  most perfect artist among women’.
  • Katherine Mansfield described Woolf’s Night and Day as ‘Miss Austen up to date’.
  • Mansfield and her husband read Jane Austen together. Mansfield admired Austen’s abilities to plot novels.
  • Elizabeth Bowen wrote a BBC programme about Austen’s life.
  • Iris Murdoch counted Mr Knightly as her favourite fictional character.
  • Austen fantasised that her friend, Anne Sharp – a governess and amateur playwright – might marry her employer.

Charlotte Brontë

  • In Jane Eyre, Brontë fictionalised the kind of scenario Austen had dreamed of for Sharp.
  • Brontë’s lifelong feminist author friend, Mary Taylor, helped Elizabeth Gaskell with the first biography of their mutual friend.
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe claimed that Brontë appeared to her from beyond the grave.
  • Woolf claimed that Brontë ‘will write in a rage when she should write calmly’.
  • Woolf felt that Austen had ‘less genius’ than Brontë but ‘got infinitely more said’.
  • Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre.
  • Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca owes a debt of gratitude to Jane Eyre.
  • Du Maurier wrote a biography of Brontë’s brother, Branwell.
  • The young Maya Angelou found the experience of reading the Brontë sisters inspiring and empowering.

George Eliot

  • Gaskell found Eliot’s unmarried status an impediment to friendship.
  • Woolf described Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown up people’.
  • Woolf also felt that Eliot ‘committed atrocities’ by aping masculine prose.
  • Rhys’ friend, Eliot Bliss, chose her pen-name as a mark of respect for both George Eliot and T.S. Eliot.

Virginia Woolf

Katherine Mansfield

  • Du Maurier’s night nursery directly faced Mansfield’s bedroom.
  • Du Maurier corresponded with the younger author, Oriel Malet, and the pair shared their love of Mansfield’s work in their letters.

Activity

One of our readers, Sarah Emsley, offered us the perfect excuse to re-read Jane Austen’s Emma as she is hosting Emma in the Snow – an online celebration of the bi-centenary of its publication. Our piece will go live on her site on January 1st, and we’ll also post a conversation between the two of us about the novel here on Something Rhymed. We’ve had such fun reacquainting ourselves with this novel – an old favourite.

If you are looking for a holiday read, we’d love you to choose Emma so that you can share your thoughts with us in the new year.

In the meantime, we both hope that you have a peaceful holiday and that 2016 is full of creativity and friendship.

Taking Stock

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Seven months into our yearlong quest to discover the friendships enjoyed by famous female authors, it seems a good time to take stock.

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Creative Commons License

We had the chance to do just that when we were asked to write a double page spread for the Independent on Sunday and a guest post for Writers and Artists.

When we first mooted the idea of Something Rhymed, we couldn’t have named twelve sets of famous female writer pals of old. We had no idea that Jane Austen risked her family’s disapproval by forging a radical relationship with a playwright who was one of the family’s servants. Who’d have thought that the mythically reclusive Emily Dickinson was a lifelong friend of the bestselling novelist Helen Hunt Jackson? As for Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, we’d heard that they were enemies.

But once we set up this blog, so many of you gave us such great tip-offs about women’s partnerships that it’s become tough to choose who to profile. We’ve become increasingly curious, therefore, about why such fascinating relationships have been misrepresented or written out of literary lore.

In our guest post for Writers and Artists, we put forward some of our theories on this.

We initially wondered whether these female alliances got overlooked because they were most often carried out within private domestic spheres. Unlike Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen and Anne Sharp never visited risqué music halls together; unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell never chronicled joint drinking binges in their published writings.

Even more significant, perhaps, is that whilst most of these men’s writing partnerships suffered spectacular bust-ups, many of the friendships we’ve featured were relatively harmonious. So it could also be that their frequent lack of drama has cost them newspaper column inches and lengthy entries in literary biographies.

Potentially most insidious, however, it that, unlike the camaraderie of Byron and Shelley, frequently recalled as robustly combative, the professional rivalry of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf was seen as entirely incompatible with female friendship.

As the year progresses, we’ve increasingly been led to wonder whether the lack of a level playing field lies at the root of it all. Although society has traditionally allowed men to accommodate healthy competition within their relationships, the same has been looked on much less favourably when it occurs between women.

We were able to explore this theory further in our feature for the Independent on Sunday.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf claimed that collaborative, intellectual friendship between women was considered taboo. The new feminists who we interviewed, however, were happy to celebrate such relationships. Laura Bates, author of Everyday Sexism, was keen to credit novelist and No More Page 3 campaigner Lucy-Anne Holmes for fuelling her own success. And co-writers of The Vagenda, Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, friends since their student days, have relied on each other during periods when they’ve had to face down misogynistic attacks.

The sheer level of aggression faced by these friends suggests that although such relationships are no longer taboo, female solidarity is considered subversive even today.