“Literature,” wrote the great poet, “cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”
Robert Southey, Britain’s poet laureate from 1813 to his death in 1843, was responding to a letter from a young correspondent seeking his advice on her early work. She wanted to know whether she might fashion a writer’s life for herself. It was 1837.
Southey continued, warming to his theme: “The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.”
Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte as painted by their brother, Branwell.
His correspondent was discouraged, but not entirely. Ten years later she wrote Jane Eyre, one of the greatest works of English literature. There was a reason why Charlotte submitted her manuscript under the male pseudonym of Currer Bell. Her sisters Emily and Anne Bronte used the masculine monikers Ellis and Acton. Mary-Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot.
You might think we have come a long way since then, but J. K. Rowling never published as Joanne.
The choice to adopt a male or neutral author-byline is a rational one – research shows that men are far less likely to read books written by women than they are to read books written by men.
In general, women show less readerly bias. They will read books by both genders. A recent trend ignited by TikTok urged women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire.
Strong anecdotal evidence seems to indicate: a lot (my own subject reported he thought about the Romans “at least once a fortnight” because “they invented so much stuff”).
I can’t speak for other women, but my version of the Roman Empire is the Bronte sisters – their wild, isolated weirdness, the startling, it-will-out nature of their talent, and the enormous burdens they faced as women writers – are ceaselessly fascinating to me. How did they do it?
I thought of the Brontes again recently, when I read a story about the gender bias in the authors and poets studied by final year students in NSW.
While authorities have increased the number of female authors, out of 105 authors, poets and film directors on the set text list, 61 per cent are men and 39 per cent are women.
The English head of an all-girls school told the Herald her teachers often chose writers like Margaret Atwood and Emily Dickinson to “counterbalance the many male voices in the curriculum”.
Thank god for the Brontes – their unlikely incubation in the Yorkshire Moors has considerably boosted the female ranks of the canon.
But despite being a Bronte stan, I find the idea of a gender quota for literary texts profoundly silly. Should literature reflect your own experience; help you make intellectual and philosophical meaning of your unique existence? Or is it a humanist project exposing us to the foreign experiences of characters we would otherwise never know, but with whom we can nonetheless sympathise? It’s a false choice, of course because good writing does both.
Professor Jacqueline Manuel is a Professor of English Education at Sydney University and a former chief examiner of Higher School Certificate English in NSW. She says gender balance is one “lens” by which we should select texts for adolescents to study, but it shouldn’t be a guiding principle.
“Just because a book is written by a man or a woman doesn’t mean the imaginative text they’ve created doesn’t have a view beyond the single male or single female view,” she says. “There are male writers who create astounding portraits of female characters, and vice versa.” This is a profound rejection of rigid ideas around cultural appropriation in authorship, and an affirmation in the literary imagination to overcome gaps in experience.
I agree. But the biggest problem I have with any mandating of female authors is the underlying assumption that they speak only to female experience, whereas male authors are universalists, who describe the human condition in a more profound way.
This is often claimed of the robustly-masculine Great American Male authors. Regular readers of this column will know I’m a Philip Roth fan, but I don’t see much of my (feminine) experience in his work. Indeed, that’s why I like it. Conversely, any idea that George Eliot is seen as depicting the feminine, rather than the foible-ridden and universally human, is untenable.
Jane Austen wrote about the world of marriage and family from the arch perspective of female heroines. But while her books are notoriously difficult to teach to teenage boys, I don’t think anyone could relegate Austen to what American novelist Meg Wolitzer called “the second shelf” in a 2021 essay on how differently contemporary female authors are marketed, compared to their male peers.
Charlotte Bronte’s work does reflect female experience in a more explicit way. Jane Eyre is universal in its themes but much of its originality comes from the candid interiority of its plain heroine. No character like Jane had ever been considered worthy of literature before, and her close first person narration made the modernists possible. Crucially, Jane rages against the strictures of her femininity and depicts what we would now call toxic masculinity with clear-eyed precision.
Speaking of which: Bronte’s reply to Southey skated elegantly the line between propriety and sarcasm. “In the evenings, I confess I do think,” she wrote to him. “But I never trouble anyone else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits.”
Southey’s letter is now owned by the Bronte Parsonage Museum. His poems are not studied, and few outside academia remember his name.
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