Vera Brittaine’s second novel, An Honorable Estate
Dear friends,
This is another qualifying comment to my previous blog.
I am elevating it from a second comment buried in an obscure blog (see first in above linked in previous blog) because the subject — the lack of interest I’ve found among women readers, retired, mature, and 20 to 40 year olds (I saw this in graduate schoool long ago and see it now in young collagues) in books by women, or women’s literature as such, feminist or not, is to me so demoralizing, as well as inexplicable I want to shout questions & hurt objections to imagined rooftops.
Can women really prefer to read male genre and/or men’s books? I cannot understand this.
In all the autobiographical comments I’ve been telling others — on my blog, on my listservs, Facebook and Bluesky, letters to to friends, I seem to have omitted an important element in my decision. When I work so hard to be able to join in on these classses (my form of socializing, having conversations about books), or in online reading clubs, or to teach myself, I leave no or little room for what I most love and want to do: books written by women, especially when there are conscious pro-feminist characteristics.
I read three of these this past spring in a courses on Winifred Holtby a OLLI at York, moved this fall on my own to Brittaine’s The Testament of Youth, The Dark Tide and now An Honorable Estate
I love this photo of Brittain
There are very few women’s literary courses in these adult and retired education classes, so little open feminism even of the literary variety. Actually there are not many straight literature courses (except for Cambridge literary and women’s studies online). An example of the effect of this is how now that I’ve begun the E. M. Forster reading for my spring courses (syllabi to come), and am joining in as list moderator reading and discussing Steven Amarnick’s splendidly restored The Duke’s Children on Trollope & Contemporaries @groups.io on, and I’ve finished the Lanah Sawyer/Elizabeth Channing matter for my winter course, I’m losing my ongoing experience and grasp on Vera Brittaine’s Honorable Estate. I am not sure how the second heroine and her daughter (Jessie and Ruth) are coping with the local social structures that thwarted Janet Harding’s education of becoming any use for her (previous generation), her vocation as a writer (another married woman could have had a woman-centered vocation as a career). I’m not reading it enough in my good hours! Our first heroine fought hard to work for suffrage and her devotion to the cause lost her her best friend (because Jane could not take care of her family so squeezed Ellison’s plays out), and at the same time she could not escape the inexorable tyrant husband. I’m fightomg hard just to read about them, in the current books whiule in my mind doing justice to Brittain’s feminist dramatization.
I don’t want to move away from my critical studies of 1920s-40s century British women’s novels. They are in ordered piles across my library tables
Why does the emotional core of fascism spread? the need one has of a family, as well as its central role in each person’s formation, the capture of women into a servant for men and children, E. M. Forster’s Howards End shows the flailing. So man’s book can be about this capture (of working class young male dreamer like Leonard Bast too); but the male has got to be unusual. Forster was gay or homosexual.
I am making central to my retirement plan the study of feminist literary history, I’ll carry giving feminist literary courses n the shorter terms (no matter if for the shorter sessions of 4 and 6 meetings. I would take such, only, as I say, there are so few, they appear so rarely at Politics & Prose, or OLLI at York. Cambridge is expensive, and its outlook is a combination of high culture, theory, and the usual few women’s classics (they are improving on that).
I have begun by making separate files for 1930s Women Writers & Vera Brittain, as this summer my proposal for the 6 week session at OLLI at Mason is:
1930s British Women Novelists & Friends: Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf
This course will be about the importance of friendships (support systems, close sisters) for women novelists’ careers. One famous 1930s or between “the wars pair,” Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtby, are arguably a trio which includes Virginia Woolf about whom Holtby wrote the first study. We’ll study the era too, analogous to our own, where just looming fascism, war, & a hard pushback against suffragist/feminist gains comes out of an increase in professional women artists & first flowering of professional women artists, mystery writers, e.g. Vanessa Bell & Carrington, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers. Participants will read Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece novel, South Riding (weeks 1-4); Vera Brittain’s novel, The Dark Tide (week 5); and three short novellas from a volume by Virginia Woolf (week 6). The class will view a choice from apposite great movie adaptations, South Riding, Testament of Youth, and the brilliant To the Lighthouse.
So you see in the few years left to me I am wanting to immmerse myself in what absorbs and provides me with such vivid intense pleasures of escape which speak to my frustration, lonelinesses, and successes. I’m just now slowly making my way through Gabaldon’s 800+ page Voyager, the third Outlander book. Claire and Jamie function as surrogates/ites for me to remember and relive Jim and my love.
Late evenings perusing Jeffrey Rosen’s Conversations with Ruth Bader Ginsburg — lucid, intelligent, wonderful, deeply humane both participants. I made time to follow 3 classes at Politics and Prose with Linda Greenhouse on the women justices of the supreme court. This new compromise of a life is not just the result of having lived an autistic college teaching adjunct’s and writer’s life, then turned bereft widow, but having had two strokes at age 78.
Ellen
P.S. The crazed desperate laughter is mine as this all depends on my carrying on getting my widow’s annuity and social security. I don’t know if we can make it in this house w/o Izzy’s salary — she could be fired at any time I suppose. Trump & some largish percentage of the rich & very rich are glad of these changes, so as groups too evangelical Christians, and misogynists, racists and neo Nazis.