WRITING THEIR WAY TO TRUTH
Since early Victorian times, women have been fighting the silence around the abuse of power. Lyndall Gordon, Little Brown, R315
In 1915, Virginia Woolf emerged from a mental breakdown only to witness the madness of the Great War’s slaughter. Opposed to violence, she felt she had no country to call her own. Disillusioned, she encouraged women to form “the outsiders society”. Woolf is one of the women Lyndall Gordon includes in Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. The inspiration came to her in 1975 on a train journey to Reading, where Gordon was to give a talk on DH Lawrence. “It was early morning, a beautiful day,” she remembers. “I suddenly thought I wanted to write a book about women through the generations, and the kind of ideas they had about how the world could be.” The seed for Outsiders was planted, but Gordon went on to write six individual biographies — of TS Eliot, Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Emily Dickinson — as well as two memoirs before embarking on the project.
Gordon’s oeuvre makes it clear that the vision on the train did not remain dormant. Even when writing the two men’s biographies, she focused on the women who shaped their creative consciousness. She is drawn to women who, like James’s Isabel Archer, “affront their destiny”.
It is late morning when we meet in her flat in Sea Point. Her permanent home is overseas but she always returns to the Cape with longing. In person a compelling storyteller, she enriches the conversation with luminous literary quotes and insights.
Looking out to sea from where we sit, it is easy to picture Woolf’s “fin of a submerged form lurking in the waves”. Much is at risk. Outsiders, a “dispersed biography”, is unlike Gordon’s other work. She recalls her apprehension before it went to print. A culmination of four decades of meticulous consideration, the book is a record of revolutionary outlooks.
Interweaving the intellectual and creative work of Shelley the “prodigy”, Emily Brontë the “visionary”, George Eliot the “outlaw”, Olive Schreiner the “orator” and Woolf the “explorer”, Gordon shows how they imagined a new world order into existence. By staying true to themselves, the five defied norms and expectations.
“I wanted to show how these women looked at what is crude, ugly, abusive, dismaying in human nature, but then found a voice that was a different strain in civilised men and women: Mary Wollstonecraft spoke of ‘tenderness’ and George Eliot of ‘sympathy’.” Each rebelled against inequality and misogyny.
“Power is rotten,” Gordon says, appalled at the hunger for it, in men and women alike. “I feel like an outsider as a feminist because I don’t think power is a good thing.”
At the core of this book is what Gordon refers to as “an alternative to power”. The Brontë sisters were criticised as “brutal, unwomanly” for exposing domestic violence in their novels, she points out. “This speaks right to this time when there is a tsunami of public opinion sweeping everywhere with the #MeToo campaign.” The challenge of silence surrounding victims of power persists.
Gordon quotes the young Jane Eyre: “Speak, I must.” For the five writers speaking was a “creative and moral act”. Gordon herself believes in “being a moral being”.
“The moral being inside me is responding in a small way to the gigantic moral being in all these writers,” she says.
They wanted to be seen for who they believed themselves to be. Their legacy endures because of the intellectual and emotional potential they unlocked for us to recognise. It dazzles in Outsiders.
‘I feel like an outsider as a feminist because I don’t think power is good’