THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Female Eunuch (1970, reissued in paperback in 1971 and later translated into twelve languages), provided a stimulus
to the development of a newly outspoken and often provocative feminism in the period. For Greer (b. 1939), the
campaigns of genteel suffragettes had represented the ‘first feminist wave’; her own book, she claimed, formed part of
a second wave which was already evident in the fact that ‘ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution’.
Greer’s phrase may possibly echo the perception of one of the male characters in Doris Lessing’s novel, The Golden
Notebook (1962): ‘The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution-they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is,
women against men.’ For both Greer and Lessing (b. 1919) that revolution began with a heightened alertness to the
narrow representations of women’s roles, and women’s consciousness, in society and its literature.
Lessing had begun her career as a writer with novels concerned with the growth of political awareness amongst
native blacks and white settlers in colonial East Africa. Her five-volume sequence Children of Violence (1952-69)
deals with the developing political commitment, and the later political disillusion, of Martha Quest. Martha is
carefully ‘placed’ at the beginning of the first novel as ‘adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; British, and
therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with
problems of race and class; female, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past’. Martha learns her
radicalism in colonial Africa, but she is also forced by circumstances to unlearn the Stalinist assumptions she makes
about world revolution. In the last, and most experimental, volume in the sequence, The Four-Gated City (1969), set
initially amid the fragmented political aspirations of British anti-nuclear campaigners, Martha recognizes that there
are few protesters ‘whose lives did not have a great gulf in them into which all civilization had vanished,
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temporarily at least’. The novel ends with a projection forward to the years 1995 and 2000 after a devastating atomic
war. Martha discovers a hope for the future on a remote Scottish island where a group of mutant children has had its
mental powers enhanced, and its social vision reintegrated, by the effects of radiation. In many ways, The Four-Gated
City marks the beginning of Lessing’s exploration of what she has called ‘inner space fiction’, a fiction that has
systematically moved away from conventional realism. It was, however, with her central work of fiction, The Golden
Notebook, that she first began to relate the concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form.
The novel is shaped around the series of notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue, kept by a woman writer, Anna
Wulf, as a means of separating and analysing different aspects of her life. The notebooks seem to present her with a
means of ordering her life according to neat categories, both private and public, but Anna’s evolving perceptions of
herself finally dictate that her attempts at categorization break down, not into new patterns but into an inevitable and
welcome formlessness. The Golden Notebook is in many ways a traditional narrative subjected to a process of
disordering. It can be seen both as a wayward development of the kind of nineteenth-century realist fiction admired by
Marxist critics (including Lessing herself) and as an attempt to come to terms with an intelligent woman’s sense of
private and public diffusion. Anna herself realizes that she is incapable of writing the only kind of novel which
interests her, ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way
of looking at life’. Her awareness is accompanied by the conviction that this diffusion is a symptom not of social,
mental, or ideological disease, but of personal liberation. Anna had once struggled with the ‘banal commonplace’ that
‘women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists’; the narrative shaped around her bid
for freedom gradually allows her the perception of the new, if still insecure, value that is to be found in the fact of a
woman’s creativity.
Insecurities also haunt Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in part a rethinking of Mr Rochester’s account of
his courtship and marriage as given in Jane Eyre. Rhys (1894-1979) transfers the scene of her novel away from
Charlotte Brontë’s damp England to the lusher, more tempestuous West Indies of her own childhood (she was born in
Dominica). She also radically alters perspectives. Her four earlier novels, published between 1928 and 1939 and set in
the lax, anything-goes world of European bohemians, had dealt with women determined to explore the implications of
their sexuality and, ultimately, with women adrift and women exploited. In Wide Sargasso Sea, however, these
themes were replayed with a new intensity and savagery. In a narrative divided between Rochester and his Creole
wife-to-be, Antoinette Bertha Cosway, Rhys explores the nature of loneliness, exploitation, and victimization. The
novel interlocks the corrupt and uneasy society of the post-emancipation Caribbean, its decaying plantations, its
exotic, untrimmed gardens, its ghosts, and its tropical storms, with the onset of Bertha’s mental
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turbulence. ‘I think of my revenge and hurricanes’, she writes, ‘Words rush through my head (deeds too). Words. Pity
is one of them. It gives me no rest.’ The last section, set in the draughty attics of Thornfield Hall, ends with Bertha’s
unsteady awareness of what she has to do with the flickering candle that she has stolen.
Rhys’s career contrasts vividly with that of the outwardly far more conventional Barbara Pym (1913-80). Like