are not allowed wives.
Alice, how is your novel? I do quite like your title. The Well of Loneliness: but I think someone has already used it. Do check with your tutor. You ask me how to write a ‘good novel’. Well, the writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending I do not mean mere fortunate events — a marriage, or a last-minute rescue from death — but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.
‘This is a far, far better thing,’ said Dickens at the end of Tale of Two Cities, ‘than I have ever done.’ And look how that sold!
Readers need and seek for moral guidance. I mean this in the best and even unconventional sense. They need an example, in the light of which they can examine themselves, understand themselves.
If you are good, Jane Austen promised, you will be happy. Emma learns to control her foolish impulses, and marries Mr Knightley. Anne in Persuasion holds fast to her ideals of unchanging love, and brings her lover back to her. Elizabeth comes to distinguish unthinking prejudice from impartial judgment, and so can love and be loved by Mr Darcy. Jane Austen defines our faults for us, analyses our virtues, and tells us that if we will only control the one with the other, all will yet be well.
That to be good is to be happy is not something particularly evident in any of our experiences of real life, yet how badly we want it, and need it, to be true. Of course we read and re-read Jane Austen.
It is in this sense that the City of Invention is so valuable to us. In this other City, virtue is rewarded, and the bad are punished; and all events are interconnected, and what is more, they rise out of characters and action, not chance. Had you noticed how rarely coincidence occurs in the City of Invention? It is frowned upon here: it upsets the visitors. Coincidence happens in real life all the time. Not here. Cause and effect must rule, or else the readers will prefer reality, with its chaos and coincidence. They will leave the City, in droves.
We want and need to be told how to live. Let me quote from What is to be Done?, written by Nicolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. People have been reading it for more than a hundred years. Virago have just re-issued it. What is to be Done? is what’s called a World Bestseller as is Emma. It is a study in self-control and moral development as is Pride and Prejudice. It is the story of a girl from a brutal background who grows into a fine young woman, runs a dress factory cooperative in Czarist Russia and becomes a doctor. She marries twice: the first marriage is sexless, since the sexual act is seen as something rather animal and undignified and standing in the way of true companionship and true love: in the second marriage sex is allowable as an expression of love. Chernyshevsky almost seems to be saying, like St Paul, ‘Well, better to marry, I suppose, than to burn.’ He offers us an agreeable and stirring and achievable Utopia, if only we would learn to control ourselves and our passions. He does not invoke God, as the Church does, as the interventionary power required to bring general self-control and Heaven here on earth: he sees the strength latent there in both man and woman, if only they will use it.
It is stirring stuff: we should have more of it. He addresses his reader boldly, thus:
I wager that up to the concluding paragraphs Vera, Kirsanov and Lopukhov (his protagonists) have seemed to the majority of the public to be heroes, individuals of a superior nature, if not ideal persons, if not every person’s impossible aim in real life by reason of their very noble conduct. No, my poor friends, you have been wrong in this thought: they are not too high. It is you who are too low. You see now that they simply stand on the surface of the earth: and, if they have seemed to you to be soaring in
Alice, how is your novel? I do quite like your title. The Well of Loneliness: but I think someone has already used it. Do check with your tutor. You ask me how to write a ‘good novel’. Well, the writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending I do not mean mere fortunate events — a marriage, or a last-minute rescue from death — but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.
‘This is a far, far better thing,’ said Dickens at the end of Tale of Two Cities, ‘than I have ever done.’ And look how that sold!
Readers need and seek for moral guidance. I mean this in the best and even unconventional sense. They need an example, in the light of which they can examine themselves, understand themselves.
If you are good, Jane Austen promised, you will be happy. Emma learns to control her foolish impulses, and marries Mr Knightley. Anne in Persuasion holds fast to her ideals of unchanging love, and brings her lover back to her. Elizabeth comes to distinguish unthinking prejudice from impartial judgment, and so can love and be loved by Mr Darcy. Jane Austen defines our faults for us, analyses our virtues, and tells us that if we will only control the one with the other, all will yet be well.
That to be good is to be happy is not something particularly evident in any of our experiences of real life, yet how badly we want it, and need it, to be true. Of course we read and re-read Jane Austen.
It is in this sense that the City of Invention is so valuable to us. In this other City, virtue is rewarded, and the bad are punished; and all events are interconnected, and what is more, they rise out of characters and action, not chance. Had you noticed how rarely coincidence occurs in the City of Invention? It is frowned upon here: it upsets the visitors. Coincidence happens in real life all the time. Not here. Cause and effect must rule, or else the readers will prefer reality, with its chaos and coincidence. They will leave the City, in droves.
We want and need to be told how to live. Let me quote from What is to be Done?, written by Nicolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. People have been reading it for more than a hundred years. Virago have just re-issued it. What is to be Done? is what’s called a World Bestseller as is Emma. It is a study in self-control and moral development as is Pride and Prejudice. It is the story of a girl from a brutal background who grows into a fine young woman, runs a dress factory cooperative in Czarist Russia and becomes a doctor. She marries twice: the first marriage is sexless, since the sexual act is seen as something rather animal and undignified and standing in the way of true companionship and true love: in the second marriage sex is allowable as an expression of love. Chernyshevsky almost seems to be saying, like St Paul, ‘Well, better to marry, I suppose, than to burn.’ He offers us an agreeable and stirring and achievable Utopia, if only we would learn to control ourselves and our passions. He does not invoke God, as the Church does, as the interventionary power required to bring general self-control and Heaven here on earth: he sees the strength latent there in both man and woman, if only they will use it.
It is stirring stuff: we should have more of it. He addresses his reader boldly, thus:
I wager that up to the concluding paragraphs Vera, Kirsanov and Lopukhov (his protagonists) have seemed to the majority of the public to be heroes, individuals of a superior nature, if not ideal persons, if not every person’s impossible aim in real life by reason of their very noble conduct. No, my poor friends, you have been wrong in this thought: they are not too high. It is you who are too low. You see now that they simply stand on the surface of the earth: and, if they have seemed to you to be soaring in
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