Meta Books: The Unpublished and the Failed

No 2: The 'Woman's Writer' Revisited

                                

 

It’s better to oversleep and miss the boat then get up early and sink.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard)

This book proposal about female writers of the mid-20th century was actually commissioned a couple of years ago, but after much thought I decided not to do it.

Which went down quite badly - and I suppose was very annoying. Writers are annoying. Very few of us are like the passive creation of one of my ‘women’, Anita Brookner, whose romantic novelist protagonist in Hotel Du Lac always submits her typescripts ahead of deadline (imagine!!!)

My main reason for backing out was that a serious biography of Jean Rhys (above) - one of the book’s chief subjects, along with Elizabeth Jane Howard and Elizabeth Taylor - had recently been published and it seemed perverse to proceed.

But I was also sincere in my belief that the premise behind the book, that these writers were undervalued, had ceased to be true. Perhaps not true of certain individuals (Rhys, except for Wide Sargasso Sea?). But the quasi-feminist idea that they were undervalued essentially because they were female - ‘woman’s writers’ - now seemed a bit #metooforthesakeofit.

I had waited too long - I thought.

For instance: having worshipped EJ Howard since my teenage years, and dreamed for some time of writing about her, I realized that, post-Cazalets (which I admired far less than the early stuff), she was being feted all over the place. I remember a radio book programme in which plaudits were heaped upon her like cushions on a hotel king-size and saying to myself: on the one hand this is great, but on the other (selfish) hand, you have missed the EJH boat. I read her biography, which gave a strange impression of not much liking her work, and was slightly vexed by that too.

Elizabeth Taylor: ditto. The ‘other’ ET - not the sumptuous diamond-drenched one, but the literary genius disguised as a well-to-do Buckinghamshire housewife - had surely become ‘the’ ET. Again her biography left me slightly frustrated, in this case because it gave an impression of not approving of her lifestyle - why was she sitting in pubs in Penn, when she could have been at literary parties? (I’m with ET on that one). But undervalued: no.

Now I wonder… ET certainly had a ‘moment’ recently, when it felt as though everybody whose opinion I admired (I suppose that includes myself?) was in love with her. The days when Saul Bellow heard ‘the tinkle of teacups’ in the Booker-nominated Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (that terrifying book! more likely to make one hear the rattle of death) were long gone.

Nevertheless writers go in and out of fashion - this happened with Rhys in the late 20th century - and fashion is not the same as a proper valuation.

So I don’t know.

But here we go.