Wishing to be Shakespeare's Sister

Easier than actually writing.

I’m a big enjoyer of, like, romantic biographies, especially of literary (or literary-adjacent) couples. I’ve written about Dorothea Osbourne & William Temple; I love Heloise & Abelard (biography here, letters here) and Penelope Rich & Sir Philip Sidney. I have consumed maybe eight biographies of Sylvia Plath &/or Ted Hughes, my favorite being Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages is an all-time favorite. But my enjoyment is marred by a tendency in these biographies that makes me squirm with cringe: an overfocus on how Zelda or Dorothea or whoever “could have been writers.”

I felt huge relief reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction & Betrayal (on the recommendation of Anarchivette, my greatest thanks). The following quote charmed me but still had me unpleasantly gearing up for the “she coulda been a writer” thing:

Jane Carlyle's letters, published after her death, are more brilliant, lively, and enduring than all except the best novels of the period. She was so interesting a woman, such a good conversationalist, such an engaging storyteller that everyone was always urging her to write novels. Carlyle himself liked to say she had surrendered her own talents in order to help him to have his great career.

But then she follows up with:

Among her friends in London there were a number of women writers. Professional activity was not unthinkable or even especially daring - and she was childless and he was busy as Thor up in his study.

Imagining Mrs. Carlyle as a novelist is a natural extension of her letters with their little portraits of ordinary people, their gift with anecdote, their fluent delight in the common events of the day. But she lacks ambition and need - the psychic need for a creation to stand outside herself.

&:

It is very risky to think of her as a failed novelist or as a "sacrificed" writer in some other form.

And then, earlier in the book although I read it after, in her essay on Dorothy Wordsworth, the distillation:

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity.

This was hugely refreshing to read. I love Jane Carlyle & Dorothea Osbourne & other brilliant letter-writers, and I hate when every secondary source I can find on them kind of hagiographically & mournfully harps on how much they would have done if it wasn’t for the patriarchy. My contrarian streak comes out; I can’t help thinking “But surely it’s possible that they wouldn’t have written anything else anyway, surely it’s imaginable that even absent patriarchy they would have, like many talented men, just not written anything out of laziness or lack of discipline or sheer lack of interest,” & then I compare the leisure of a 19th century English lady or a Zelda Fitzgerald, to the more contracted schedule of the working woman of today. I really hate that the ubiquity of the “she coulda been” thing combines with my own disagreeableness to put me in this mood of disparaging their letters & diaries (which are better work than anything I’ve done) & envying their position.

But the question of what these women would have accomplished literarily in a less restrictive environment (my bet is on “more than they had the chance to in this world, less than their most starry-eyed biographers dream—especially Zelda, please be serious”) is not what interests me most here. What interests me most is, like, what that question does for people, how it functions for people, what it does to someone when their imagination of history has too high a ratio of “what this figure could have done, if only” to “what this figure actually did.”

You may not be surprised: I suspect it’s unhealthy. If it makes people grateful for their luck & willing to work hard to honor the fact that they have opportunities that other people have lacked, that’s good. But I think there’s a certain kind of dangerous satisfaction in imagiing the frustration of being unable to prove oneself, of imagining never having to prove oneself, which can put people in a bad habit of looking for reasons .

I wanted to make a mean tweet earlier, something about how Zelda Fitzgerald biographies sell better than George Eliot biographies because people would rather imagine being a potential novelist frustrated by circumstances than being an actual novelist working hard & making deadlines. But I worried that the male pseudonym would confuse my point.

The word “male” reminds me. This post has mostly been about women writers, or women could-have-been-writers, partly because I am just particularly interested in women writing, and partially because people have been pulling this move about women for a very long time. But lately I have been noticing men doing it more, about men. Talking a lot for instance about how the publishing industry is not male friendly. On the one hand, this is like, probably true; on the other hand, what publishing industry? Rejoice, you’re being excluded from a dying business.