ten sceptics, twenty questioners and, thank God, one hundred simple readers: the proportion was the same in the twelfth century as it is today: only the scale is different, and (in the West) there are lighter penalties for writing what displeases, and thinking what is inconvenient. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society. Elizabeth Bennet, that wayward, capricious girl, listening to the beat of feeling, rather than the pulsing urge for survival, paying attention to the subtle demands of human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention, must have quite upset a number of her readers, changed their minds, and with their minds, their lives, and with their lives, the society they lived in: prodding it quicker and faster along the slow, difficult road that has led us out of barbarity into civilization.
Now, the questions asked last night by the readers of Canberra, those same questions asked of Sturluson and Tolstoy and George Eliot and any writer who even once ventures a public opinion on the way the world is run, and their relation to it, are sensible enough. They are what I ask other writers. They are what I would ask Jane Austen if I were her contemporary. They are the questions that her biographers try to answer for her.
I think they sometimes get it wrong. I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way.
Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‘And who is this Mr Knightley I see on the third line down? Is he going to marry Emma?’ (I daresay two chapters into the work she simply didn’t know, but no reader/visitor is going to believe a thing like that.) So the work is covered. It isn’t shame, merely prudence. As for disturbances, some writers thrive on them. For many, if life provides uninterrupted leisure for writing, the urge to write shrivels up. Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.
I would have thought the small, round table, half-way between fire and window, sitting with a warm back and life going on the other side of the pane, when you chose to look up from the page, and the occasional knock at the door, and a putting away of the work, was an ideal place and way for any writer to work, It’s how I choose to do it, I know that. I won’t have her pitied for it.
I do pity contemporary male writers, who have wives to bring them coffee and answer the phone to the bank manager, and no excuse not to undertake, not to complete, not to get published, and who find themselves with nothing to say. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. It is something you do with your hands, like knitting. We were not born with typewriter keys for fingers; we were born to pick up sticks and scratch away in mud and make our ochre marks on the walls of caves. Now, given that we must make a living, we join the Writers’ Guild and the Society of Authors and fight for our rights and our royalties and have to do so — but we should not be misled as to the true nature of our occupation. We do not need offices and a muted typewriter and no disturbance — we need a table half-way between the fire and the window, and the muted sound of the world around: to be of that world, and not apart from it. It is easier for women than it is for men, the world being what it is, and women writers, to their great advantage,
Now, the questions asked last night by the readers of Canberra, those same questions asked of Sturluson and Tolstoy and George Eliot and any writer who even once ventures a public opinion on the way the world is run, and their relation to it, are sensible enough. They are what I ask other writers. They are what I would ask Jane Austen if I were her contemporary. They are the questions that her biographers try to answer for her.
I think they sometimes get it wrong. I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way.
Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‘And who is this Mr Knightley I see on the third line down? Is he going to marry Emma?’ (I daresay two chapters into the work she simply didn’t know, but no reader/visitor is going to believe a thing like that.) So the work is covered. It isn’t shame, merely prudence. As for disturbances, some writers thrive on them. For many, if life provides uninterrupted leisure for writing, the urge to write shrivels up. Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.
I would have thought the small, round table, half-way between fire and window, sitting with a warm back and life going on the other side of the pane, when you chose to look up from the page, and the occasional knock at the door, and a putting away of the work, was an ideal place and way for any writer to work, It’s how I choose to do it, I know that. I won’t have her pitied for it.
I do pity contemporary male writers, who have wives to bring them coffee and answer the phone to the bank manager, and no excuse not to undertake, not to complete, not to get published, and who find themselves with nothing to say. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. It is something you do with your hands, like knitting. We were not born with typewriter keys for fingers; we were born to pick up sticks and scratch away in mud and make our ochre marks on the walls of caves. Now, given that we must make a living, we join the Writers’ Guild and the Society of Authors and fight for our rights and our royalties and have to do so — but we should not be misled as to the true nature of our occupation. We do not need offices and a muted typewriter and no disturbance — we need a table half-way between the fire and the window, and the muted sound of the world around: to be of that world, and not apart from it. It is easier for women than it is for men, the world being what it is, and women writers, to their great advantage,
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