ROLE OF WOMEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 67, 21 March 1939, Page 6

ROLE OF WOMEN

; ♦ IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL FEARLESS WRITERS Last year, writes Sir Hugh Walpole in the London "Star." I listened to Mr. E. M. Forster broadcasting on the year's novels, and the principal point that he then made was that women were now dominating the English novel. One Sunday I looked at the book advertisements and saw that there were, in fact, two women to every man novelist in those lists. As to quantity, then, Forster was apparently right. My heart sank. Men novelists were almost vanishing. I saw myself and one or two of my friends stamped to pieces under the rushing horde of feminine avengers; I then consoled myself a little. Quantity, yes. But what about quality? Take twelve representative male living English (including Ireland and Scotland) novelists: — H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Aldous Huzley, Somerset Maugham, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Charles Morgan, J. B. Priestley, Francis Brett Young, Frank Swinnerton, R. C. Hutchinson, L. A. G. Strong, and twelve representative women:— Virginia Woolf, ' Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, "Elizabeth," Clemence Dane, G. B. Stern, Margaret Irwin, Henry Handel Richardson, Enid Bagnold. I have in every case taken established writers, omitting freaks, the cherished favourites of small cliques, and the -merely popular. Can any unprejudiced person really pretend that the first six of the women rival the first six of the men? Two of the finest novels by women in this country are Mrs. Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and Elizabeth Bo wen's "Death of the Heart," the latter published only the other day. Place these against "Ulysses," "Polly," "Of Human Bondage," "Angel Pavement," "Point Counter Point" —to take a few at random. Is not the competition unfair? But in this very comparison lies, I think, the answer. There is no man living or dead who could have writr ten "To the Lighthouse" or "Death of the Heart." WOMEN'S CREATION. Woman as a novelist is, and always has been, supi'eme in one world and in one world only. Scott said he could do well enough the "bow-wow" strain, but the miniature work of Jane Austen was beyond him. And is it not significant that the only two novelists of the last century who are read widely today are Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, a very symbol of the difference between the "two races"? We can, in fact, narrow it down more rigidly, for1 this especial kind of novel is th':-only creative art in which women have in large numbers shown distinction. Women poets there have been, and are, from Sappho to Vita SackvilleWest. Women painters? Angelica Kaufmann, Berthe Morisot, Marie Laurencin, Ethel Walker. Women composers? Brave, gallant Ethel Smythe, who writes even better than she composes. No, this is women's own creative kingdom—the finnicky, sub-malicious, brilliantly detailed, humorous, social, spider-like novel —arid, let me add, one of the finest things human beings have yet created. Bus what I wanted to discuss at the beginning of this article is the increase of women novelists. Take the English novel from the middle of the eighteenth century to 1900, and how many women novelists do we remember? Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Miss Ferrier, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Anne Thackery Ritchie, Rhoda Broughton. Not very many! But suppose that from the very beginning of the novel as we know it (and wasn't, after all, the originator of the modern novel the wicked Aphra Behn?) the women had predominated in numbers as they do today—in proportion, of course, I mean. BROADSIDES AT MORALITY. There would possibly have been no Samuel Richardson, no Sterne. They wrote the feminine novel in the eighteenth century. What would have happened to the morals of the English novels, morals that, until George Moore crossed the English Channel with his French novel in his pocket were, in the hands of English gentlemen, so very fine? Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Kingsley, Charles Reade all thanked their Maker that they had never brought a blush to the cheeks .of a young English miss! Not so, I fear, the! women! One after another they have delivered broadsides at English morality. Aphra Behn herself was most indecent. Mary Shelley was shocking.' "Jane Eyre" caused an explosion. "Adam Bede" was most dangerous: the women of the nineties were "pernicious" with their "Heavenly Twins," "Yellow Asters," and "Keynotes." Mrs. Ward's "Robert Elsmere" shook the foundations of religion, and not so long ago "The Well of Loneliness" was condemned by an honest Magistrate. Women, in fact, have been always fearless as novelists. They care too deeply for the truth of things to be intimidated by anyone or anything.