800 Years of Women's Letters (43 page)

My view of the situation is this. The
Daily Herald
can help us if it will be attacking the Government: firstly on account of the refusal to give votes to women, and secondly on account of the policy of coercion. Between the WSPU and the Daily Herald League and Movement there can be no connection. Ours is a Woman's Movement and the Herald League is primarily a Man's Movement or at any rate a mixed Movement. . . . The great need of the time is for women to learn to stand and act alone. . . . No men, even the best of men, ever view the Suffrage question from quite the same standpoint as women. You speak of the Herald Movement and the WSPU as being akin . . . but there are great psychological differences. . . . The women's rebellion has been in preparation for centuries. It is expressing something deeper and bigger than anything expressed by present-day unrest among men. Women are beginning to realise that they must grow their own backbone before they can be any use to themselves or to humanity as a whole. It is helpful and
it is good for men themselves
when they try to promote women's emancipation; but they have to do it from the outside, and the really important thing is that women are working out their own salvation . . . and are able to do it, even if not a living man takes any part in bringing it about.

Another fundamental difference, is that the Herald League tends to be a Class Movement. Ours is not a Class Movement at all. We take in everybody – the highest and the lowest, the richest and the poorest. The bond is Womanhood! If women, with their greater altruism, had had their due influence from the beginning they might have been able to prevent the existence of abuses which men socialists are now trying to get rid of. [Though she fully agreed that the Parliamentary Labour Party had been a miserable failure, she was not at all sure that workers' control was the answer to the nation's ills.] If it turned out that Britain could only be governed by riot and violence I am game for that sort of thing. But I mean to try at the other thing first – when the vote is won! Not that we value it only or chiefly for its political value. We want it far more for its symbolic value – the recognition of our human equality that it will make. This may sound very old-fashioned and nineteenth century, but women have a lot of leeway to make up. When we have done that, then we will help the men to solve the problems of the twentieth century. Plainly they can't settle them without us. But for the time being it comes to this. The men must paddle their canoe and we must paddle ours.

EDS. DAVID MITCHELL,
QUEEN CHRISTABEL: A BIOGRAPHY OF CHRISTABEL PANKHURST
(1977) (The originals can be found in the Harben-Tuke papers, British Library Dept. of Manuscripts, Add MSS 58226)

Freya Stark reveals a gentler vein of female humour, analysing the politics of Arabic manners, in this letter to Venetia Buddicom written on her first visit to the Middle East.

Brumana
4 January 1928

Dearest Venetia,

I have just been taking a rest from perpetual Arabic, looking into Graves' book on Lawrence. Save us from our friends! I begin to feel the man almost unbearable. This attitude of continually saying ‘I would like to be modest if only I could' is ridiculous and probably not at all true to the poor man. If only I can get to Baghdad, I have a letter to Mr Woolley who worked with him on the Euphrates and should be full of interesting information. I see with pleasure that it took four years in the country to teach him Arabic: it makes me feel less painfully stupid. I now begin to follow the drift of conversations and to attempt ambitious subjects like Doughty's Arabian travels in my efforts with Miss Audi at lunch. There is plenty of practice: every afternoon we pay a lengthy call (about two hours) and sit on a divan talking gossip interspersed with one of the sixteen formulas of politeness which I have collected so far. After a while a large tray is brought in with all sorts of delicious sweetmeats, wine, tea; we take a little of each – (fearfully bad for my inside) – and say ‘May this continue' as we put down the cup; and the hosts say ‘May your life also continue', and then we leave. I believe there is no feeling of class in this country at all: you are divided by religions, and as you see nothing practically of any religion but your own, you never have the unpleasant feeling of being surrounded by people who are hostile and yet bound to mix up their lives with yours.

I am very popular here – the one and only person who has ever come to learn Arabic
for pleasure
.

Your loving
Freya

EDS. C. AND L. MOOREHEAD,
THE LETTERS OF FREYA STARK
(1974–82)

In this letter, Anaïs Nin argues for honesty in wartime at the beginning of the Second World War.

You refuse to free yourself from serving in the Army by declaring your homosexuality. And by this you will live a double lie, for you are also against war. At the same time you feel burdened with guilt. Our only prison is that of guilt. Guilt is the negative aspect of religion. We lost our religion but we kept the guilt. We all have guilt. Even Henry [Miller, the novelist] has it, who seems the freest of all. Only domestic animals have guilt. We train them so. Animals in the jungle do not have it.

Everything negative should die. Jealousy as the negative form of love, fear the negative form of life.

You speak of suffering, of withdrawal, retreat. Face this suffering, for all the real suffering can save us from unreality. Real pain is human and deepening. Without real pain you will remain the child forever. The legend of Ondine tells of how she acquired a human soul the day she wept over a human love. You were caught in a web of unreality. You choose suffering in order to be awakened from your dreams, as I did. You are no longer the sleeping prince of neurosis. Don't run away from it now. If you run away from it without conquering it (I say accept the homosexuality, live it out proudly, declare it), then you will remain asleep and enchanted in a lifeless neurosis.

ANAÏS NIN,
JOURNALS
(1970)

La Pasionaria, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, links the personal and political in this letter, written a few weeks after the death of her son Ruben, to the young workers at Krasnoiarsk, who had named their brigade after him.

As both a mother and a communist, I was moved when I was told that a Brigade which has named itself after my son is working on the construction of the great Krasnoiarsk Hydroelectric Power Station. It's difficult to convey what this means to me. My son Ruben is still alive in your dreams, in your hopes and in your heroic work, the construction of the biggest hydroelectric power station in the Soviet Union!

Even as a child in Spain he was used to hard work and struggle. He always helped us in the difficult life of a worker's family. He distributed banned Party literature and newspapers with us. He took part in demonstrations where workers were attacked more than once! When I was arrested, the leaders of our Party decided to send my two sons to Russia, to let me devote myself to the revolutionary activities of our Party, in the tough living conditions we were facing in Spain, without having the constant worry of leaving them to fend for themselves.

In the Soviet Union, Ruben worked in the Lijachov factory and during the Spanish war he returned to fight alongside his countrymen in the ranks of the People's Army.

When the Spanish Republic was defeated, he was interned by the French government, like thousands of other Republican soldiers, in a French concentration camp – which he was allowed to leave to go back to the Soviet Union, his second homeland. He attended the Military Academy, and joined the Soviet Army to go on to fight from the very first day against the Nazi aggressors. He was gravely wounded while defending Bielorusia, and was awarded the Order of the Red Flag for bravery. His wounds had not fully healed when he took up arms again, to be killed heroically in the defence of Stalingrad. He was given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Please forgive this short biography of my Ruben, as brief as his life; he was 22 years old. But I wanted to write, so that the friends and comrades who named their Brigade after him should know that Ruben wasn't a rich man's son, but a worker like you and a young communist who fought in Spain and sacrificed his life in defence of the Soviet Union.

Dolores

TRANS. O. KENYON, PRIVATE COLLECTION

The epistolary novel is composed entirely of letters. It grew out of women's need for creativity, out of their shaping of their experience in correspondence. Letters deal with significant incidents, with problems and possible resolutions, with responses and conflicts between personalities in ways that link them with the pattern-making and character analysis of fiction. Epistolary novels are among the first examples of the novel, the ‘new' form.

Histories of literature generally state that Defoe and Richardson were the creators of the English novel, but over a century before them, two women, Aphra Behn and the Duchess of Newcastle, first realized the potential of unifying epistles with a semblance of narrative. In
Sociable Letters
(1664) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, offered a moral guide, often sought in letters by daughters ‘who are but branches which by marriage are broken off from the root'. Behn, the first professional woman playwright, was also a skilful poet. Her
Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister
was probably published as early as 1683. Based on a real scandal, the novel reflects a desire for news reports and contemporary sexual scandal in the traditional discourse of woman as victim of passion.

Letters had the advantage of male acceptance, flexibility, and popularity. They could also incorporate travel reports, enabling the heroine to widen her narrative with tales of adventure in distant countries.

As Dale Spender has shown, in
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen
, there were a fair number of women publishing successfully in the eighteenth century. It was Eliza Haywood who established the popularity of the epistolary novel, writing seventeen. She extended the structure while putting the heroine through a moral test. Her works can be seen as a document of the development of the genre, from
Love in Excess to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
(1751). This latter novel was much admired by Fanny Burney, who said it inspired her delightful
Evelina
(1776).
Evelina
, still an under-rated work, exploits the supposed veracity of letters, with a girl's fresh reactions to London society, while exploring women's position in that culture.