Your first encounter with Pamela Norris’s Words of Love is unlikely to be a cheery one. The book jacket uses an image from a 1890s mezzotint that shows a droopy looking woman, appropriately dressed in dense, oily blue, licking an envelope into which she has just, presumably, stuffed her own particular words of love. From the woman’s worried-looking eyebrows, putty-coloured complexion and naked ring finger it looks as though this particular love affair has long since passed the stages of joyful beginnings or comfortable completion. Rupture rather than rapture is what lies ahead, and, in case you still haven’t got the point, the book’s subtitle provides a strong nudge that now might be a good time to hand round the tissues. ”Passionate Women from Heloise to Sylvia Plath” intones the doomy strapline, making it only too clear that the shadow meaning of ”passion” is agony, even crucifixion.
Norris’s book is a curiously old-fashioned one, situated in a way of thinking about women’s writing that looks back to the 1980s, when every clever girl went about with a copy of Elaine Showalter’s classic doorstop A Literature of Their Own weighing down her bag, leaving her with one shoulder slightly lower than the other. The emphasis in those days was on ”recovery”, identifying the lost heritage of female writing and literary experience that Virginia Woolf had so mourned in A Room of One’s Own. Until those ”foremothers” — everyone from Margery Kempe to Dorothy Richardson via Aphra Behn and the Brontes — had been shaken out from the folds of patriarchal literary history and marshalled into an orderly queue, women would be obliged to write into a void, howling their words into the wilderness.
Feminist literary criticism has, of course, moved on since those days, when you could be forgiven for thinking that every female writer in history was either immured or mad (The Madwoman in the Attic was, indeed, the other must-have Eighties text for worried-looking girls with an itch to scribble). But Norris seems still to be languishing in a vale of tears where to be female (or rather to be a female writer — a distinction she never quite attends to) is to be left waiting for something: a lover, a letter, professional recognition, a signal to suggest that one is not, after all, quite forgotten.
There is also something rather dusty about Norris’s choice of case histories, the ”passionate women” who march down the spine of her narrative. So, once again, we have Christine de Pizan getting righteously angry about the misogynistic worm nestling at the heart of Jean de Meun’s chivalric Roman de la Rose. From there it is a short sprint to Charlotte Bronte writing her anguished letters to Constantin Heger, the married schoolmaster who will not return her love. Next there is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sequestered in Wimpole Street, preferring to send notes to the bouncy Mr Browning rather than have him come and boom at her in person.
Woolf, inevitably, makes an appearance both as a commentator on the ”problem” of women finding a space to write as well as a model for how it might be achieved (Leonard Woolf, naturally, gets full marks for being the kind of husband whom all clever girls, then and now, would like to bag).
Finally, Norris ends with an extended retelling of the Sylvia Plath story, trundling through the shiny high-school years, the breakdown during that long, hot summer break from Smith College, the volcanic meeting with Ted Hughes at the St Botolph’s party during which Plath’s hairband and earrings are once again flung to the floor. Over the past 30 years these biographical narratives have become classics in their own right, taking equal space alongside their fictional and poetic reworkings in Aurora Leigh, Night and Day or The Bel l Jar.
Indeed, in some cases the biography has swamped the work — for every 20 people who know what happened to Plath in that last freezing winter of 1962/63 there is probably only one who has tussled with the Ariel poems.
Villette is still regularly scanned for clues as to what really went on during Bronte’s tormented time at the Heger pensionnat. By simply retelling these fragments of life-writing rather than taking them apart, Norris is in danger of permanently consigning writing women of all temperaments and historical moments to a kind of weepy, inky sisterhood.
Of course, regressive reading can be a lot of fun, and there are several guilty pleasures to be found in Words of Love. Who wouldn’t want, once more, to be reminded of the creaky door at Chawton that alerted Jane Austen to the fact that it was time to shuffle her writing out of sight and take on her drawing-room persona? Or to marvel again at the way that Edna St Vincent Millay transformed herself from shabby Maine schoolgirl to the vamp of Greenwich Village? Or to travel south again with Elizabeth Barrett Browning as she shakes off Wimpole Street and blooms amid the orange groves of Florence? These stories are the adolescent fairy tales on which generations of restless girls raised themselves, vowing that they too would find a room and a voice of their own. The problem for Norris is that those women have long grown up, and a new set of narratives, more nuanced but no less engaging, are now in play. — Â