I was on a car journey recently and bought my first ever copy of The Times Literary Supplement in a service station. I knew about TLS because Virginia Woolf used to write for it.
Most of the articles in TLS are reviews of newly published books. Two specific titles caught my mind and I’m going to tell you about them today. The third title I came across while doing research for the first two books. All three books are biographies of women writers from the 16th and 17th century, and for me, all three books have a link to Virginia Woolf and especially her essay A Room of One’s Own. Maybe the spirit of Virginia Woolf is still haunting TLS!
I haven’t read any of these biographies yet. I read the reviews in TLS and did some research around them, and found them interesting, so would like to share with you in this post.
The Scandal of the Century
The first book is The Scandal of the Century, published on 9th May 2024, by Lisa Hilton. As it says on the beautiful book cover, it’s about Aphra Behn, a rebellious daughter and the astonishing story of England’s first novel.
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. She was one of the first English women to earn a living by her writing. I first heard of the name of Aphra Behn from Virginia Woolf. She says in her essay A Room of One’s Own:
Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.
Behn was the role model and great grandmother of professional women writers for generations to come. But with a lowly family background, how did she learn to write so brilliantly? She also did translation work. Where did she learn the languages? She was a spy for the king of England, how did she manage that? The first part of The Scandal of the Century, introduces this fascinating woman’s birth and life.
Apart from her writing, you might have also heard that Aphra Behn is not a role model for good girls. She had a reputation for loose morals. The book title, The Scandal of the Century, refers to a real story that happened during Behn’s time, between Lady Henrietta Berkeley and her sister’s husband, Lord Grey, which Behn made use of and wrote into a novel called Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, full of sex scandals and political manoeuvre.
What intrigues me most about this biography is that, according to TLS, “Hilton intertwines the stories of fictional Silvia and real Aphra”. Hilton, the author of the biography sees a parallel between the lives of Aphra Behn and the fictional character in Behn’s novel, in the way they refused to be put in the conventional box of how women were expected to behave. I wonder if Behn saw it that way too? Especially as Behn based her novel on the story of “the most notorious adulteress of a notoriously adulterous age”, according to the audiobook description. Did Behn see herself in the teenage Lady Henrietta Berkeley?
Shakespeare’s Sisters
The second book is called Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff, published on 12 March 2024.
The title Shakespeare’s Sisters immediately remind me of another idea from Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, where she imagines what if Shakespeare had a sister, equally talented. Would she have ever become as famous a playwright as William?
The title of the book seems to be implying that these women writers from the 16th/17th century are the sisters of William Shakespeare: Mary Sidney, the sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney; Aemilia Lanyer, the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems; Elizabeth Cary, the first woman known to have written and published an original play in English, which might have been inspired by Othello; and Anne Clifford, who wrote diaries and letters, and more famously, fought for decades to inherit the land of her father.
The group biography starts with the funeral of Queen Elizabeth I and among the crowd and the procession mourning her death, the four women are connected one way or another. They were mostly from aristocratic families with wealth, education and leisure to write. They had rooms of their own. I think in addition to introducing the four little known women, this book would give perspectives, context and insight into the world and time of Shakespeare too.
Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish
The last book is called Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock. The hardcover came out September 2023, the paperback comes out on 12 September this year.
Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle is an old friend. She was a contemporary of the women writers in the previous two books. She wrote all sorts. I read her most well known work, The Blazing World. There’s a portrait of her royal self in a local pub, I look at her like an old friend every time I walk past. If I can catch the attention of anyone who’s with me at that moment, I say, look, this is the Duchess of Newcastle, she wrote one of the first utopian romance science fiction novels. But generally speaking, no one cares.
I can’t remember if I first heard of her from Virginia Woolf’s same essay as well, where she comments,
“What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote “the best bred women are those whose minds are civilest” should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with.”
I’m not 100% sure if Woolf is being sarcastic or straightforward. If you read The Blazing World, you can definitely sense a very unusual mind behind the story at work. It’s surprisingly free and fantastical. However, writer is only one of her many identities. I read a little from the introduction to the book. She was the star and talk of the town, and was followed and crowded and chased down the streets by general public and teenagers that remind me of Beatlemania. When at a time the Royal Society was for men exclusively, they couldn’t resist inviting Cavendish for a visit. The subject matters of her writing are unconventional for the time too, apparently she wrote poems about how atoms function and the destruction of civil wars in her first book, published with her real name, which was very rare for a woman to do at the time. She lived at the same time as Shakespeare. I wonder if we could call her one of Shakespeare’s sisters too?
This biography aims to restore Cavendish’s literary reputation back to where it belongs. I hope it talks about her fantastic person as well as her works. I also hope along the way, the author will show us the Elizabethan world where Cavendish lived and breathed and dazed too.
So, which women writer are you most interested in reading more about?
A Day of Small Things 