Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
cally gentlewomen than the daughters who make themselves odious by
looking down on them. 26
In a later article, on Eliot’s life as well as her work, she offered her readers a doubleedged
defence against any moralizing condemnation of Eliot’s unconventional domestic
arrangements. She pronounced:
With regard to the marriage question, it is the point where the highest
and the lowest natures meet, for to act in opposition to custom may be
due to the loftiest motives, or it may be the result of a selfish craving
for personal gratification. And perhaps the marriage law of the future
will owe more to the rebels of the first class than it will suffer from the
influence of the last. It appears to me that the experience of George Eliot
should serve rather as a plea for greater liberty of divorce than a weakening
of any true marriage bond. 27
Thus, in the guise of a defence of the sanctity of the marriage of true minds and
hearts, she argued for a greater freedom for divorce. Spence’s literary articles did not
use literature simply as a springboard for sermonizing. She distinguished artistic
from social or moral value: she praised Eliot for balance and artistic completeness, as
well as for her ethical purpose; she observed of Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African
Farm: ‘As a novel the book in nowhere, as an expression of revolt it is everywhere’,
went on to remark not only that it was ‘a strange book to come from such a nest of
missionaries’, but also to credit its originality; and she commented on Mona Caird’s
The Wing of Azrael that its author ‘has ability, but she wants balance and proportion,
and often sins against good taste’. 28 Readers of Spence’s account of George Eliot’s
works encountered occasional illuminating insight, and discerning judgment, but
her prevailing concern was with social and moral values. Her review of a book by
‘Mrs Alick MacLeod’ (Catherine Mackay/Martin), The Silent Sea, a novel set in a
gold-reefing district of South Australia, conveys little information about the story,
but a good deal about its humour, and about Spence’s view of humour, and descriptions
of nature, as refuges in the face of ‘mental suffering’. 29
It was, however, with her social and political articles that she really began to hit
her straps. Of course, Spence used her access to the daily press to advance each of
the causes that she was involved with: education, particularly advanced education
for girls; the welfare of destitute children; and, endlessly, electoral reform. She also
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