My Weekly Book

Here are a couple of excellent articles from the New York Times books section for anyone who fancies a bit of feminist inspiration. The first reviews a book by Lisa Appignanesi about the historical collision between women and the mental health establishment:

Diagnosis: Female

…it seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her. As Appignanesi observes, “Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women – romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination – comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering. Victorian women who weren’t locked up for falling victim to lypemania (melancholy), monomania, homicidal monomania or “moral insanity” were at risk of neurasthenia, a “mirror image of rebellion” in which their “nervous depletion” was explained as the result of their “incursion into the masculine sphere of intellectual labor,” a strain that constitutions formed for tender sentiment couldn’t be expected to support. And then came hysteria, which “best expresses women’s distress at the clashing demands and no longer tenable restrictions placed on women in the fin de siècle.” Read full article here…

The second takes a look at Germaine Greer’s biography of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. As a great admirer of Virginia Woolf I found the following excerpt, which ends the article, incredibly resonant:

Reclaiming the Shrew

In “A Room of One’s Own,” with its famous riff on Shakespeare’s sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, “one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. … What one wants, I thought — and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? — is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; … did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring.” And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, fiercely imagined. Read full article here…

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Meanwhile, over at The Telegraph, they really do love their lists. Here’s a link to the latest – the top 50 cult books of all time.

Worth reading alone for its refusal to take itself too seriously: “What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula “ whacko”; books our children just won’t get… Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.”

An interesting article in The Telegraph today, spinning off from the BBC’s seasonal adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

Now, it just so happens that I read this book within the last month or so, although I didn’t watch the adaptation. And I was struck by the points being made:

Sense and Sensibility or pain and prejudice?

Yet I can never read Sense and Sensibility without it sending a shiver down my spine. I don’t recognise this as a “wonderfully entertaining tale of flirtation and folly”, as one edition bills it.

Instead absent fathers, inadequate mothers, ambitious women on the make, financial insecurity, near-fatal illness and abandonment stalk this book. It should be taken only with a large glass of whisky on a stormy night, when Dostoevsky seems too much of a giggle.

Of course, Sense and Sensibility can be very funny: Marianne’s conviction that her would-be suitor Col Brandon, a flannel- waistcoat-wearing 35-year-old, is ancient and decrepit skewers the workings of the 17-year-old mind exactly – Austen began a version of this novel in 1795, at just 20. But from the beginning, poverty, desertion and grief lurk darkly at the edges. Read full article here – includes major plot points.

I think that the argument being put forward makes even more sense if you stop trying to compare Sense and Sensibility to Pride and Prejudice or Emma and instead look at it in terms of the darker Austen works – Mansfield Park and Persuasion. A worthwhile and thought-provoking read, I found, and a good argument as to why Austen and her world view are a lot less trivial than is sometimes alleged.