Rebecca Solnit – Men Explain Things To Me : And Other Essays

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Book Review, Feminism, Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit

‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ for the Twenty-First Century

I have adored Rebecca Solnit’s writing since I found her wonderful book exploring an activity almost all of us do, or have done, and take for granted, though some of us have a passion for it – walking.  Her book Wanderlust, A History of Walking showed what a fine, broad, interesting mind she has, exploring the biology and evolution of walking, the development  of walking for pleasure instead of necessity, cultural attitudes to walking, the sexual politics of walking, walking as resistance and political action, and much much more.

So I knew I was going to be absorbed, educated, enlightened angered and amused by Men Explain Things To Me and Other Essays, a collection of investigations into various aspects of the relationship between men and women, and into the workings of a society which has clearly shown of late how far we still have to go

In the first, title essay, Solnit looks at ‘mansplaining’ though she doesn’t use the term with a wince-worthy encounter with someone who clearly was all mouth and no ears.

The Longest War explores the dark subject of rape.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender

Worlds collide in a Luxury Suite takes the issue of power and domination into the relationship between capitalism, the IMF, and the way the developing world has been exploited and held back. She links this story with the personal one of Dominique Strauss-Kahn formerly head of the IMF, and the African chambermaid he was charged with assaulting

In Praise of the Threat looks at the changing history of marriage, and how same-sex marriage, without the historic inequalities of marriage between the sexes, metaphysically may make for a recognition that a marriage should be between equals. Which is not what marriage has traditionally been.

Grandmother Spider examines the invisibility of women within much genealogy. Look at the Bible, as example. All those begats, almost all men. Where are the daughters in  the list, where the mothers?

Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grand-mothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history

Woolf’s Darkness is a celebration of Virginia Woolf, and her willingness to face the darkness – her own and the world’s, and to engage with the mysteriousness of life, and the not-knowing. This is probably the most poetic of the essays. By which I mean that it takes the reader, by flash of unknown and surprising juxtapositions, as poetry does, into seeing the non-linear nature of our lives

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognise that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretences at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation

Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force is a celebration of feminism, which, as Solnit points out is not just about changing women’s lives for the better. We (men and women) are on a journey here

Feminism is an endeavour to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, Innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth – and in our minds, where it all begins and end”

“I think the future of something we may no longer call feminism must include a deeper inquiry into men. Feminism sought and seeks to change the whole human world; many men are on board with the project, but how it benefits men, and in what ways the status quo damages men as well, could bear far more thought

Thought provoking, articulate, beautifully written; thoroughly recommended

Men Explain Things To Me UK
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Samantha Ellis – Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life

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Anne Brontë, Book Review, Feminism, Samantha Ellis, Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life

A sisterly fight for the youngest, overlooked Brontë

I confess, with some shame, that the youngest Brontë, Anne, is the one I have never explored. Clearly, I surrendered to the fake news floating around for nearly 200 years which dismissed Anne as being lesser than her more respected siblings, Emily and Charlotte.

Anne has been championed in more modern times for her more realistic, less romantic, heroines, as the sister who more clearly reflected the way society was weighted against women, and, moreover who explored a journey towards independence for her heroines, a self-actualisation free from the lures of ‘the Byronic romantic hero’ which renders Emily’s and Charlotte’s books so very alluring to impressionable minds.

Anne might just be the writer for the woman wanting to make a journey out of myth.

And Ellis is a perfectly placed writer to explore this territory.

Anne by Charlotte 1834

I adored Ellis’ first book, How to be a Heroine, which engagingly, intelligently, passionately, thoughtfully and entertainingly explored the various ‘heroines’ of literature whom female readers might internalise as aspirational role models. This was, and is, a book a strongly recommend to all of my literary minded sisters, as a feisty book which provokes much enjoyable debate. And THIS book will be another, and is certainly heading me over to explore Anne’s two novels.

Ellis writes exactly the kind of literary non-fiction which I most enjoy. Forget dry, cerebral, academic theory, which pins its subject matter like a chloroformed butterfly, so that it will never fly again. Without losing any ability to analyse, or being any less intelligent in analysis, what Samantha Ellis brings is dynamism, a whole-hearted, gut-felt, lively intellect engagement with her material. Literature MATTERS to her, it is a living thing, and she observes the flying butterfly of a book, a life, a society on the wing, and observes herself observing it, rather than pretending a book, a life, a society are something outside our observation. The observer is always also having subjective responses.

Anne by Branwell

Ellis takes (of course she does!) an interesting approach to her analysis of Anne, her life and her books. Rather than a linear approach, she looks at the seminal influences on Anne, with a chapter devoted to each influencing person. And also chapters devoted to the central characters of her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – there must, surely, always be a kind of symbiotic relationship between a writer and their creations. The writer (well, the depth writer, anyway) will create characters from their own ‘stuff’, but what is also happening is that written character is also potential, offering an ability for writer (and reader) to have something fed back to them, by the imaginative invention.

And I was pleased to discover (so Ellis, so Anne!) that the positive influence of less obvious individuals were allowed to take their places in Anne’s formative sun – not only her missing mother, Maria, who died in Anne’s infancy, but Aunt Elizabeth Branwell, Maria’s older sister, who moved from her beloved Cornwall to be the motherly presence in the Haworth household. Tabby, who served the family all her life, also provided stability and love. The often harshly vilified father, Patrick, is also shown to be far more positively formative, with his commitment to education, and a strong sense of class inequality, and its unjustiice.

…when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers?  Anne Brontë, preface to Tenant of Wildfell Hall

It must be said that the person Ellis is most censorious of is the best known, most successful sister – Charlotte, and her proper champions, Mrs Gaskell and Ellen Nussey. It was Charlotte who prevented, initially, the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death. In writing a realistic novel about alcoholism and about violence within marriage, Anne had written too modern, too truthful a book. And one, moreover, ‘unfeminine’ The book was considered by some, coarse, because it showed truth, and held a mirror up to society. Charlotte rather presented the sanitised image of the youngest sister, shy and sweet, and what the youngest actually wrote, conflicted with the docile image :

Wildfell Hall it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer. Charlotte Brontë

At this time of course Charlotte is a literary sensation. There is no doubt she loved her sister, but it seems she may have found it easier to love the idea of a weak, ineffectual angel (possibly an unhealed loss of her eldest sister, Maria, who it seems WAS that child), but found a more tough-minded, truth, rather than romantic illusion, facing sister, too tough a prospect. A more modern, psychologically driven analysis also has to wonder about any role played by sibling rivalry. Despite being seen by some as ‘coarse’, BECAUSE it did not romanticise, Wildfell Hall did sell well, on first publication.

It seems even more poignant than getting her age wrong on the original inscription, that her status, in her own right, was omitted

Samantha Ellis, in offering us a wonderfully complex, interesting person, challenging-of-pre-conceptions writer, in her Anne Brontë biography, does the reader a service by clearly indicating where she is ‘imagining’ from her own perspective how Anne might have felt, or thought this and that, with also backing up some of her assumptions by textual evidence from the books, from social history documents of the times, as well as Bronte-and-friends letters and other documents

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man Anne Brontë, preface to Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Woven into the book, in a way I find wonderful, is a kind of life-story, journey, of Ellis as artist and woman. This is a harking back to her first book ‘How to Be A Heroine’ as she uses Anne’s writing, Anne’s complex, struggling heroines, Agnes and Helen, to help her reflect on her own journey. Reminding me (who needs no such reminder) of the power of literature to shape lives. We learn and are inspired by a multiplicity of stories – our own, those of others we know personally, also figures in our own times on world stages, figures from other times – but, also, the inspiration of imagination itself, and that most ancient, and most potent of teachers – story.

I received this as a digital copy for review purposes from the publisher via NetGalley

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Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

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A Room Of One's Own, Book Review, Feminism, Virginia Woolf, Woolfalong, Writing on Writing

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”

I read this many years ago, and always remembered it fondly, so it has been a real pleasure to re-read it. I had forgotten quite how sharply, precisely, creatively and wittily Woolf makes her points. And I had also forgotten quite how beautifully her ‘stream of consciousness’ style works in a non-fiction setting, where she is exploring the unequal opportunities afforded to women in terms of exploring and fostering their creativity, their education, their growth and development, in a world whose systems were designed to exclude them.

Her 1928 book, A Room Of One’s Own is a world away from the dry marshalling of facts, and a world away from hammer bludgeons of polemic too. Yes, there is anger – at discovering as a female, she is not allowed to walk on the hallowed grass – only College Fellows can do that, and, hey-ho, there are no female fellows. The chapter of ‘disallows’ on a quite ordinary day continues, locking her out of the library, the meaner endowment of colleges for women – because, until only some fifty years before the book was written, all a woman possessed was her husband’s. Changes were put in place after the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. But it did mean that as, in the main, as she points out, most men were less interested in advancing the education of women than women were, until Married Women had the legal right to own the fruits of their own paid labour and to inherit property, the likelihood of generous endowments to colleges for the further education of females was less likely than the generous endowments to colleges for the further education of males.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

The writing of this essay followed on an invitation Woolf received from a Cambridge college to give a lecture on ‘Women and Fiction’ and follows her musings on what this could possibly mean : A talk about women in fiction, as described by male and female writers; a talk about female authors; a talk about what women are like – or some combination of ‘all of the above’

Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’ writing perfectly serves this incisive, discursive account, examining women’s position in society, examining why the novel has proved to be a potent creative place for women, and mixing analysis of society, history, literature, and political structures in a wonderfully fertile, creative, juicy, living way. She refutes those who have undervalued women’s creativity, dedication, imagination and genius, in the creative arts or elsewhere, by showing how often it was a powerful, moneyed, privileged few who produced ‘geniuses’ – and how much of this was due to access to education. She points out that our dearly loved Shakespeare himself was some kind of rarity – he was not part of the aristocracy. And, to take another tack, over the last hundred or so years, there have been all those pathetic attempts to claim Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but some cover for a lord.

a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Given the wonderful, but dice-weighted-against-it, reality of Shakespeare, Woolf imagines a sister, equally rare in creativity, and unique imagination, born in the same fertile environment which did produce Shakespeare. And she traces the impossibility of ‘Judith’ to have had access to the chances and accidents, the opportunities seized, to produce our Bard of Avon, for the distaff side. Woolf gives us sharp, thoughtful analysis – but the packaging is delicious, playful, inventive and remarkably potent.

I re-read this simultaneously laughing in delight – and raging

Life for both sexes – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one-self.

And, suddenly, my reading of Woolf came bang up to date, and I felt her going beyond the well known argument she makes, here, for the necessity for the creative artist to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’, some freedom from the demands of service to others, some independence of means – and I felt her talking about more than literature, and speaking about our divide-and-rule, and the myriad places we practice it

This is a wonderful laying out of thoughtful, philosophical, sparkling creative feminism. Delivered with wit, humour, inventiveness. Oh, she dazzled and she dazzles still.

This was read towards the end of last month, for the particular stage of HeavenAli’s Woolfalong, but, alas, a growing sense of alarm about what might be going to happen ‘across the pond’ rather took away the energy for the writing of reviews

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Sarah Moss – Night Waking

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Book Review, Feminism, Night Waking, Sarah Moss

Following my read Of Sarah Moss’s current novel Bodies Of Light which was a wonderful book, I decided to fish out my original review of her previous novel, which I then (and still do) recommend highly, but I felt had some flaws which prevented my complete surrender at the time. A surrender which WAS complete, on my part, with Bodies of Light.

Racked between self-realisation and biology,

There were times, early on this book, where I could read no more – for all the right reasons.

The overarching drive of this book is the painful, lacerating tug between `being a mother’ and `being me, and the need and right to be me’ The conflict of parenting, and the drive to be properly `there’ for the vulnerable, developing new being, without the entire loss of that self that is more than the parental role, is one which, in the main, is most intensely experienced, most intensely felt, by mothers.

The reason I had, continually, to stop reading, was because the struggle Anna, intellectual, academic, creative mother of two, had between being at times torn apart by the necessary, totally selfish, biological needs of the infant, and her own sense of self and history, were rendered so visceral, so empathised with by the reader, that I felt physically sick and anxious. She evokes brilliantly the water torture of the endless sleepless nights, with how to deal with a precocious, demanding, potentially always at risk ball of fearless, inquisitive, demanding two year old toddler life, whilst also balancing an older child with different needs.

Leaving Lochmaddy, Wiki Commons, photo from geograph.org.uk

Add to this the fact that father, Giles, mother Anna and children Raph (aged 7) and Moth (Timothy aged 2) have decamped to an ancestral Hebridean island, with no other residents. Both parents are loving and caring, and both have academic work which needs to be engaged in. Which of the two will find it less easy to switch off the demands of the child, and which will be able to do their work leaving the childcare to the other? No contest here! But this is more than a book about middle class angst, feminism, equal opportunities and high end problems within the chattering classes

Anna is researching attitudes to child rearing, from Freud onwards – but, through the discovery of a small child’s body on the deserted island, gets drawn in to investigating economic history – in a sense, there is a subtextual battle going on between Marx and Freud, which takes in the history of the Highland clearances, class, industrialisation and politics of our past.

Lest this sound incredibly dreary and worthy, the mix is given spice, warmth and humour by Anna’s own, mordant wit, and by the unintentional humour of what small children say, the monologues they have, and the way parents become able to switch instantly between childspeak and adult conversation. Raph, the older child, although clearly highly intelligent and precocious, actually seems to be closer to what one might expect of a 9 year old, and I wasn’t quite convinced by him as a 7 year old.

I had a few hesitations which stopped 5 stars – there was a little too much padding and repetition of the Moth interchanges, which began to get rather irritating. Perhaps that was the point, so that the reader inhabits the mother’s mixture of reaching a dangerous screaming point of wondering how far she might go to get a bit of peace and quiet away from the 2 year old funnies-when-you-hear-them-once, but wearing when they have been repeated. There was also too much repetition of Raph’s fears and thoughts, as well as FAR too much Moth inspired `Want Gruffalo’

I wished for a more tightly edited, slimmed down book – and better proof reading to have pushed me to 5 stars. There were various sentences which just didn’t make sense, had sentence order inverted (by adults, not by the wee ones) almost as if errors had happened in the galleys, in cut and paste, which had not been spotted.

However, the ending, and the way in which various strands of this generally absorbing, intelligent, well written, humorous and thought provoking book were pulled together, worked extremely well

A very interesting writer indeed and I hope her future books pair her with a better editor and a better proof reader

………………..And, armed with my high fives for Bodies Of Light, this one will get placed on the To Be Re-Read list AND I have bought her account of the year she spent in Iceland. She is a writer with a great sense for place and time, and, as someone who has a great fascination with (and fear of) the frozen Northlands, (me, not Moss) and the near endless days and endless nights, I know this one will be a ‘for me’ read!

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Sarah Moss – Bodies of Light

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Bodies of Light, Book Review, Feminism, Pre-Raphaelites, Sarah Moss, Victorian set fiction

Let us not forget the sisters who struggled before us

I’m at a loss to know where to start to adequately praise this excellent, layered novel from Sarah Moss, who has the stunning ability to write novels ‘about deep and complex stuff’ , engage with both the heart and the head, create real, properly dimensional, complex characters, write beautifully and unindulgently, and do all this within the discipline of a pacey narrative drive

Moss’s territory is the complex lives of girls and women, caught between their own personal identity, their calling, vocation and creativity, and the counter-pull, whether of a society which limits and curtails women, or the counter-pull imposed by the biology of mothering and the fierce demands of children

I read, some time ago, Moss’s last book, Night Waking, which I found brilliant, distressing, disturbing, but for me, there were some irritations, which pulled me back from 5 stars. Night Waking concerned a professional couple, with 2 small children, engaged in their work on a Scottish island. There was the tension of the children, affecting, differently, the mother and the father, with the mother least able to ‘follow her own star’. That book also twinned a long ago thread from the nineteenth century. And in fact, that thread skeins back to Bodies Of Light, her latest book. Though there is no need to have read the previous one. Except, you might later want to. Or indeed, as I shall do, revisit the earlier one.

Bodies of Light is set primarily in Manchester and London, between the mid-1850s to the 1880s The central family is that of Alfred Moberley, an artist and craftsman, and his increasingly successful circle, and Elizabeth, his wife, an idealistic Christian woman with a passionate commitment to female rights, to the burgeoning movements to achieve equality of opportunity for women in the field of education, primarily, and also to expose the vicious hypocrisy of the sex trade, criminalising prostitutes but not their clients. Elizabeth and Alfred have two daughters, Alethea and May, whom Elizabeth effectively sacrifices to the cause.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, first UK female doctor

This book is primarily the story of Ally, Alethea, who is raised to do her duty, by a mother who effectively resents and dislikes her, except she is the one who is raised to be the sacrificial victim for the better rights of future generations of women. Ally is one of the first groups of women to train to become doctors, so that women, particularly poor women, should be treated by members of their own sex, respecting their modesty, respecting their vulnerability.

Elizabeth is a deeply unpleasant, sadistic woman, but as a clear demonstration of Moss’s subtlety, we meet Elizabeth as she is on the eve of her marriage to Moberley, with his much more expressive, but weaker, nature. What Moss does is to show us Elizabeth’s own, steely upbringing, child of another mother wedded to fierce ideas. So one strand which returned for me, again and again, is how difficult might be the lives of the children of idealists, who are prepared to sacrifice, not only their own lives, but also the lives of others for the sake of ‘the future generations’ These are people implacable, made of steel, sometimes without the softness of empathy. Hard people to be around, often, but the people who forge beneficial and forward movements (as well, at times, as retrograde ones) The believers in isms, the ends-justifies-the-meansers.

And I believe that generations of our sisters yet to be born will thank us for what we give. And indeed what we take from others. There is no principle worth having that does not exact a price. We must recognise the cost of our principles and take responsibility for that cost. We must not deny the consequences of our own actions

Ally is a complex, damaged character, at times terrifyingly fragile, but she too, has steel. In her case, the steeliness is visited against herself. Her journey is at times unbearable, as is being reminded of the real struggle many made in order to win rights of opportunity for those who came after.

Just occasionally, she feels herself on the crest of a wave, the weight of water bearing her along. She herself has only a small role, but the fellowship of women is a tide, and it cannot be turned

But I don’t want to make this sound too worthy a read – Moss’s craft is that she is a superb novelist, and for the most part paints her characters and her story with complex and beautiful shapes and colours, rather than in big bold cartoon strokes of black and white.

Berthe Morisot; The Cradle, 1870

Perhaps nowhere did I get this sense more strongly than in the character of Elizabeth Moberley. I was reminded, in some ways, of the horrible Mrs Jellaby in Dickens’ Bleak House, who sacrifices her own children’s well-being because she is more concerned with doing philanthropic works. Dickens makes Jellaby one of his enjoyably ‘love to hate and poke fun at’ figures. But we never really see her as a real person, and understand her psychology from the inside. We stand outside, watch, judge and, in superiority, laugh at her. Elizabeth, by contrast, hateful as she is, came from somewhere, and Moss makes us empathise and understand the terror of the young mother who did not want to be a mother, and was terrified of her own feelings.

She woke up thinking of knives, took only porridge for breakfast, because even a butter-knife seemed a bad idea. She is still thinking of knives. The baby is still crying…

She is weak. She is slovenly. The baby has defeated her. If she goes out she is afraid she will buy laudanum, and if she stays in the house, there are knives. And fire, and the staircase. And windows high under the gable. The baby cries. She cannot pick it up because of the windows and the staircase, and she cannot walk away because of the knives and the laudanum

I particularly liked the structure of this book, each chapter illustrated in the description and later provenance of a piece of artwork, either painted or crafted by Moberley, or his artist friend, Aubrey West. The painting or crafted object is a capture of the story and subtext of the ensuing chapter.

Google Search was, as ever, of interest

A wonderful, rich, book, which is at the same time an easy to read one, challenging much thinking, much feeling, but without any self-indulgence. Just as her central character, doctor in training Ally, was learning how to be a surgeon, and master the arts of scalpel and suture, so Moss demonstrates equally precision with her pen, knowing what to cut out as well as what to stitch together

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Samantha Ellis – How To Be A Heroine

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Book Review, Books about Books, Feminism, How To Be A Heroine, Samantha Ellis

Fiction which writes our own inner scripts, and how we choose to live

Samantha Ellis is a British playwright whose family background is Jewish Iraqi. Her heritage has informed her writing and a search for her own identity which both acknowledges cultural and historical roots and seeks to escape from it by forging her own unique contribution, free from the expectations of that close-knit culture.

In this wonderful book, “How To Be A Heroine : Or What I’ve Leaned From Reading Too Much” , which must delight any voracious reader, and most specifically, any voracious female reader, she explores, with wit, humour, intelligence and creativity, not to mention a fine style, a trawl through literary creations who shaped her, whom she adored, was annoyed by, betrayed by, inspired by.

We all need role models to aspire to, or, as Ellis suggests, to help form ourselves, or partially model ourselves on. Intriguingly in this book, she suggests the models for many of us may be in literature, where we receive ideas of how to live, who we might be

Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon doing some Wuthering

The genesis of the book came from a passionately argued conversation with a friend. Tempestuous and dramatic, in search of a great passionate love, Ellis realised she had internalised Cathy from Wuthering Heights as a role model, whilst her friend argued for the cool, rational and realistic Jane Eyre, for her integrity and refusal to be anyone’s victim.

This sets Ellis on a wonderful journey from the classics of children’s literature, through to great and modern classic writing, and she demonstrates her eclectic, unsnobby reading tastes by even finding some positive lessons to learn from the heroines of Jilly Cooper and Jacqueline Susann! The dynamic she tussles with, over and over, is love, and work – and the validation (or lack of it) for female creativity, the female artist. There is both a personal story going on here, and a wider story about how literature helps us shape our place in the world. Her final literary heroine is Scheherazade, from 1001 nights, who offers inspiration both in her transformation over her relationship and as a storyteller, as an artist :

No writer is writing me a better journey. No writer is guiding me through my misunderstandings and muddles and wrong turns to reach my happy ending. And then I realise I am the writer. I don’t mean because I write. I mean because we all write our own lives. Scheherazade’s greatest piece of storytelling is not the stories she tells, but the story she lives

Ellis combines serious intent, with wonderful wit, panache, and whilst taking her journey seriously, has great droll fun at her own expense – and that of her heroines.

Finally rethinking her relationship to Cathy Earnshaw and Jane Eyre, she says, thinking of the Haworth moor hike with a friend which started the journey of this book :

The brilliant sunshine was very Jane weather, I thought; pleasant clear and rational. It would have rained for Cathy, there would have been thunder and lightning. And (said a small, but firm Jane voice) we would have shivered and eaten soggy sandwiches hunched under the hoods of our waterproofs

The book contains a useful index and a bibliography of all the texts.

      Vivien Leigh in optimistic spirit : After all… tomorrow is another day.

I found this a wonderful, layered book, about many things – the writer herself; the creative impulse; the growth of child into adult; literature, and the joys of fiction; changing attitudes to fiction, and its value; the changing attitudes towards women, as reflected in fiction, especially women’s attitudes to themselves and their aspirations; the different ways in which we might analyse literature, from a pre-and post-feminist perspective. Not to mention the enduring subtext by which we still so often define ourselves in relationship with men, the tug between love and work, the perceptions of marriage and motherhood.

I recommend this book enthusiastically, and will no doubt revisit the texts I know, and explore the ones I don’t

As a post-script: Part of the enjoyment of this book is the imaginative argument the reader may have with the author about the MISSED heroines, as each reader perhaps considers `and which literary characters influenced ME?’ The one I wanted to thrust upon Ellis, who crossly loved and was also hugely angered by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, was the much more feisty, proto-Pantheistic Mary from Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Definitely one of MY early heroines!

Along the way, her books and writers examined, range far and wide from Marilyn French, The Women’s Room, Lucy Honeychurch in E.M.Forster’s A Room With a View, Hardy’s Tess, Austen’s Lizzie Bennett, Louise May Alcott’s March girls, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, Hans Anderson’s Little Mermaid, The Sleeping Beauty, Jane Eyre, Nancy in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, Flora Poste in Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm, Scarlett and Melanie from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, Salinger’s Frannie. Jilly Cooper’s bonk busters, Erica Jong, Germaine Greer, Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay from Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

And more. Many more. She is nothing if not broad church in her potential heroines!

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