A Woman's Place
Just to prove that Oxford's intellectual life doesn't shut down when all the students go home and the tutors take holidays, the Oxford Literary Festival places itself squarely in the Easter vac, this year running from 23rd to 28th March. For those who stayed up, hope you caught a talk or two. If not, well, it's a date in your diary for next year.
A talk entitled 'Women Writers Writing on Women in History' has the potential to develop a pseudo-feminist agenda, but authors Anna Beer, Sarah Gristwood and Alison Weir neatly avoided this, initially talking about their latest works, before considering their reception and the process of and reasons for writing them. Yes, it was blatant plugging, but no less interesting for that.
Alsion Weir, as the best known of the panel, kicked off with an extract from her latest book (below), on Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. It's a 400-year-old murder mystery telling of a plot in which the bloody deed was botched yet the details of who exactly was involved were concealed so well that they are still debatable now.
The house in which Darnley was staying was razed to the ground, but his body was found obviously strangled in the garden. Having realized something was up, he had tried to flee. He was caught and killed but the explosion then failed to destroy the body.
Mary, a Barbara Cartland-style tragic heroine with a weakness for men who "treated her bad" and the spinning capabilities of John Prescott on a bad day, failed to distance herself effectively from the scandal, and this and her shocking capture or elopement with the Earl of Bothwell (depending who you believe) got her thrown promptly off the throne and into a long captivity.
Yet the extent of the Queen's involvement in the death of her pathetic drunkard of a husband is still uncertain and this is the question Weir tries to answer: was Mary guilty of murder, or just plain stupidity?
Sarah Gristwood has written on the far less well known Arbella Stuart, a woman determined to advance her not inconsiderable claim to the throne above all. The granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick, another formidable woman, Arbella had a strong claim to succeed Elizabeth I, and thought nothing of strengthening her likelihood of getting her arse on the throne by marrying William Seymour after her courtship to his elder brother Edward (the Seymours also had royal blood) fell through.
Not one to ever give up, even when imprisoned in the Tower, she was Webster's inspiration for a character in The Duchess of Malfi.
The trio of "women in history" was made up by Bess Raleigh, wife to the better known Sir Walter. Bess was previously portrayed as the maid scandalously deflowered by Raleigh, and later a dutiful, devoted wife and widow.
Anna Beer intends to overthrow this image to reveal a woman with a powerful position at court prior to marriage, whose battle to clear Raleigh's name continued long after his execution, and demonstrated legal and economic brilliance. Beer admits an empathy with Bess in that her career thus far has demonstrated a dedication to Walter Raleigh.
Which brings us to the title of the talk and the implications within it. Are women writers drawn to write about women in history from a sense of empathy with their subject, and does this somehow make them better historians of women's history?
We may try to argue that a woman is going to be better than a man at understanding the mind and actions of another woman, but there are dangers about appealing to that particular line of argument. In so doing we restrict all historians and authors, because if a male writer will lack something in examining the life of a woman, it follows that a female writer will be similarly unable to write effectively on men in history. In addition we relegate the history of women to a minority branch of history which can only be written on by specialist historians, rather than reinstating the women time - or historians - forgot into our general perspective of the past.
Women in history do not have to be written about or studied only by women, and the history of women is not feminist history.
To apply a feminist agenda to the lives of sixteenth century women would be anachronistic, and also subjective. However, a large number of female historians do appear to turn to biographical works.
Alison Weir claimed that women are interested in people, while men like war and government. Just as we talk of 'masculine' or 'feminine' traits, that there are subject areas which seem to appeal to one gender more than another is true: I can't deny that in my class on early modern literature 10 out of 11 students were girls. Yet, as the panel agreed, it's important not to see this as absolute, but only as a weak trend.
Those who break it are not anomalies. Men do write and read biographies of women, but this talk given by women writers on their works about women in history was given to a predominantly female audience, and I write about it as a woman.
Yet my choice of this particular talk was far more to do with an interest in how history is written than who it is written by, and my interest is largely that of an historian. And in the 21st century, the three writers all agreed that if their books are looked down upon in any way this has nothing to do with the sex of author and subject, and everything to do with their being regarded as "popular history".
This is a fact that particularly grated with Anna Beer, since as an academic her previous books have been of the scholarly variety.
She argues that her research on Bess Raleigh was as extensive as that for her earlier books and that whilst a different style is required, explaining events to an audience who may have no prior knowledge of the era requires as much skill as the construction of an academic argument. So don't assume a light or dramatic tone implies a lack of accuracy - whether in a book or indeed in this article!
The message in the talk appeared to be that these books are for everyone - regardless of their sex, and regardless of whether or not they know anything about history.
It's either an egalitarian argument or a clever ploy to increase sales.
22nd Apr 2004