Alphabet Soup

Abstract

‘W omen, if they possibly can, must write novels.’ Penelope Fitzgerald, dispenser of this startling advice, didn't complete her first novel until her early sixties. The obstacle course implied by her everyday phrase ‘if they possibly can’ is laid out in the ten volumes that comprise Parts I–III of Memoirs of Women Writers . Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women who managed to live by their pens might well have echoed Byron's verdict on ghosts: ‘Believe – if ’tis improbable, you must ; / And if it is impossible, you shall '. There wasn't much else they would have agreed on. Anna Barbauld shrugged off Maria Edgeworth's hint that they might collaborate on a ‘periodical paper, to be written entirely by ladies’. ‘Mercy on us!’ cried Barbauld, to whom the divisions between writers loomed far more compellingly than their similarities; there was ‘no bond of union among literary women', she asserted, icily, to her fellow authoress (a word which, as late as 2012, possessed for one female critic an ‘anachronistic, feline hiss of implied dilettantism’ – but which she continued to find usefully applicable to a particular type of ‘sleek, self-made’ writer 1 ).