Edition 4: The Emergence of the Women Novelists

Over the next few weeks, I will explore the theme of literature by women writers: their motivations, the challenges they faced and the enduring richness of their work. In the course of reading for this and the coming pieces, I journeyed from exploring the first novels in English written by women in the 17th century until almost the present day. And I am convinced that their writing and indeed their life, reflected the importance of religion, politics and society of the time. In a sense, when read today, they tell us the history of the century in which they were written, and they are all-the-more powerful because they speak to us quite eloquently about the politics of female identity in a time when all history was about men and the wars they waged. Very little was known about the state of women, except the general perception that they were inferior creatures of small mind. 

In this piece, I write about two women authors, one from the 17th century and the other the 18th. Both are relatively unknown to most of us, and though not as famous or popular as the Bront? sisters, Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell, have left behind an impressive body of work of not only novels and plays but satire, comedy and political writing. 

Portrait of Aphra Behn by Sir Peter Lely

Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689) is generally regarded as the first female novelist in English. Virginia Woolf’s reference to her in her beautiful long essay, A Room of One’s Own speaks eloquently to the perception of writing by women for the longest time:

“All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance”

Along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn made up a group of female writers called fetchingly “the fair triumvirate of wit”! Unlike Manley and Haywood, she did not come from the aristocracy or the upper social classes. Her origins remain somewhat of a mystery, perhaps due to intentional obscuring on her part. Interestingly, her writing did not take off until penury and the prospect of the debtors’ prison forced it. King Charles II recruited her as a political spy in Antwerp around the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665. Unfortunately, Behn’s career as a spy was not remunerative; King Charles was slow in paying (if he paid at all!) and she ended up borrowing so that she could return to London.

Forced by debt, Behn began to work for the King's Company and the Duke's Company as a scribe. She had only written poetry up until this point. She ended up being one of the most high-profile and prolific writers of the English Restoration (a time starting 1660 that saw the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy when King Charles II returned from exile in Europe). Women had been excluded from the theatre in the Elizabethan era (remember the movie Shakespeare in Love?), but in Restoration England, they made up a significant part of the audience and professional actresses played women's parts. This changed the nature and themes of Restoration theatre. 

Of Behn's considerable literary output (in all, she would write and stage 19 plays, four novels and two poetry collections), only her novel, Oroonoko, was considered seriously by literary scholars of the time. Most of her writing focused on the (imperative of) marriage for and (lack of) education for women. She was attacked for her private life; the morality of her plays was questioned and she was accused of plagiarism. Literary critics mostly ignored her due to her “vulgarity” and “masculine prose”.

In her last years, despite failing health, poverty and debt, she continued to write ferociously, though it became increasingly hard for her to hold a pen. She was quoted as saying that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry." The inscription on her tombstone reads: "Here lies a proof that wit can never be defence enough against mortality".

Frances Burney: Portrait by her relative Edward Francis Burney

Frances Burney (1752 – 1840) was born over a century after Aphra Behn to a musician father, who frowned upon her “scribblings” as something that young women of her social status should not do. Unlike Behn (who did use a pseudonym Astrea for a while), Burney published her first novel Evelina anonymously at age 26. In all, she wrote four novels, eight plays, one biography and twenty-five volumes of journals and letters; she was clearly not as prolific as Behn. Nevertheless, she gained critical respect in her own right, but more importantly, her writing greatly influenced Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. But more on that a little later.

Her novels are satirical and explore the lives of English aristocrats of the time, their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. With one exception, Burney never succeeded in having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father, who thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation. In fact, Evelina was published without her father’s knowledge or “permission”. It was her brother James who posed as the author to the publisher, and inexperienced in the art of negotiating got ￡21 for the manuscript. The novel was a critical success. Later, when Burney's father read favourable public reviews of it and realized that the author was his daughter, he saw social advantages in having a successful writer in the family and was pleased by the recognition Burney received through her work.

In the 18th century, writing in epistolary form was reaching its height of popularity. Evelina written in this form was comic and witty and portrayed the oppressive masculine values and other forms of social hypocrisy that shaped a young woman's life at the time. Evelina pushed boundaries, for female protagonists complete with character flaws, were still "relatively rare" in that genre. 

To some extent, her journals and diaries remain a great source of information about the political goings-on in 18th century Britain. For instance, she recorded the speeches of Edmund Burke at the public trial of Warren Hastings[1] for "official misconduct in India".  It is believed that Thackeray drew on the first-person account of the Battle of Waterloo, recorded in her diaries while writing Vanity Fair. In 1810, she underwent a mastectomy and described the operation in detail in a letter to her sister (she was conscious through most of it, as it took place before the development of anaesthetics).

But her influence was particularly evident on Jane Austen. Austen read and enjoyed her early novels, and her wit and talent for satire in the depiction of English life at the time show Burney’s influence over her work. Furthermore, we can see shades of Burney’s epistolary form in Austen’s Lady Susan and to a lesser extent, Pride and Prejudice. And it is believed that the title of Pride and Prejudice was derived from the final pages of Burney’s novel Cecilia[2], wherein one of the characters Dr Lyster says: "The whole of this unfortunate business has been the result of pride and prejudice."

During a time when the pre-occupation of women who knew that finding a good (read wealthy) husband was the only quest, female protagonists in Behn’s and Burney’s books show a rare streak of independence, were aware of the political and social realities that shaped their life, nevertheless had a voice, and enabled many other women, future writers and otherwise to aspire to the same voice in their lives and in their writing. 

Next week, I’ll write about the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell, whose books I devoured as a very young girl, and with the many other books I read, not only established a life-long love of literature but also gave me a window into the lives of women in those centuries. Some of the characters in these books serve as role-models even today, establishing the enduring nature of these novels, but also reminding us that there has been both little and a lot of progress in the perception of female identity.

References:

[1] The impeachment of Warren Hastings was a failed attempt between 1788 and 1795 to impeach the first Governor-General of Bengal in the Parliament of Great Britain. Hastings was accused of misconduct during his time in Calcutta particularly relating to mismanagement and personal corruption. The prosecution was led by Edmund Burke and became a wider debate about the role of the East India Company and the expanding empire in India. The trial became a debate between two radically opposed visions of empire—one represented by Hastings, based on ideas of absolute power and conquest in pursuit of the exclusive national interests of the colonizer, versus one represented by Burke, of sovereignty, based on a recognition of the rights of the colonized.

[2] Incidentally, the publishers, Thomas Payne and Thomas Cadell, paid Burney ￡250 for this novel, printed 2000 copies of the first edition, and reprinted it at least twice within a year. The first edition of her next novel, Camilla, sold out; she made ￡1000 on the novel and sold the copyright for another ￡1000. It is clear that her writing supported her financially. Her fourth novel, The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties, made Burney ￡1500 from the first run, but the work disappointed her followers and did not go into a second English printing, although it met her immediate financial needs