Features
Women Authors of Yesteryear
I continue that trend of thought and mention women authors who we of my generation read with such delight. Maybe I need to add here that my friends and I who were bookworms were in the era of long ago when the medium of instruction in the city schools and those run my missionaries was English. Thus English was our first language. Consequently we neglected Sinhala which was taught as a subject timetabled for a 40- minute lesson each day. Our leisure time reading was English books.
Enid Blyton (1897-1968) was the author who opened the door to English literature for us with her very easy readers and progressing to stories narrated in higher English. We did not have the Famous Five series, but there were plenty of other stories and series to be engrossed in. Louisa M Alcott and L M Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables and the Anne books that followed were our favourites. They captured our childish imagination and kept us pre-teen girls reading at all times, even surreptitiously into the night.
In the early teens it was Baroness Orczy and the Scarlet Pimpernel who engrossed and charmed us. We thrilled to the antics of the British fop who in disguise became the bravest of men rescuing French aristocrats from their tumbril rides and kneeling before the mechanical chopper of heads – the guillotine.
Then came Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird, the former especially striking chords of empathy as we went through our early teen years, never difficult, never giving our mothers headaches. To Kill …was indelibly engraved in our minds after seeing the film with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. By then we were prone to swoon seeing pictures of male film stars and Gregory Peck was firm favourite of many a young girl.
Later we graduated to Daphne du Maurier and Margaret Mitchell, so much so that the books lent by friends were brown paper covered and read during study time in our school hostel. Gone with the Wind was a tome, so also Forever Amber. Once seeing me engrossed in a book, with nary a word shared with a friend during the entirety of the evening study hour, the Matron asked me what I was reading. “A history book, Miss Kaule” was the prompt reply. The thumping of the heart started then. “That must be a most interesting history book!” was the acid comment. But not for Mama Kaule to sneak around and steal a peek at the book.
We graduated to the classics when we were in our late teens and after. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Virginia Wolf were authors we read. Austen’s slow moving novels did not cause impatience in us, since our lives in conservative Kandy were similar to her fictional families’ lives; love being such slow moving romances; evening walks and mothers’ sole intent being to get daughters married. Virginia Woolf and her Mrs Dolloway A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse were read when nothing more exciting was at hand. Added interest in her was that we knew of Leonard Woolf. As young women we were totally unappreciative of her unique style of writing: stream-of–consciousness in which she focused on character development rather than on plot development. It was much later after higher studies in English literature and a mind that was maturer that I appreciated her novels.
Later I marveled at some of the Indian women writers, two of whom won the Booker Prize. One of the latest best reads has been Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). Her second novel, she having written only two being engrossed in politics and social concerns, The Mystery of Utmost Happiness (2017) did not appeal to me much since most of it was political and of the tensions in Kashmir.
The novels of Anita Desai – The Village by the Sea and Cry, the Peacock and her daughter Kiran’s The Inheritance of Loss were more appreciated as the background of the stories being India was familiar to us.
Unread Women Writers
A biography of Zelda Fitzgerald mentions that Scott Fitzgerald definitely did not encourage his wife to write, never encouraged or allowed her to publish her writings. He was jealous of her skill and ingenuity and stooped to copy some of her ideas and even phrases, with no acknowledgement. No wonder poor Zelda went insane, with bottled up ability and perhaps inspiration, and the yearning to write being frustrated.
Didn’t Dorothy Wordsworth, a good poet herself, hide and sublimate her talent to encourage and facilitate her brother’s, and probably Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry, innovating as they did Romaniticism and writing about ordinary things of nature, in ordinary language? Of course here the choice was hers, not the result of male domination or male instigated suppression.
Leonard Woolf’s sister, Bella, who spent several years with him in Ceylon during his civil service in the first decade of the 20th century, was a writer herself. She made considerable contribution to the writings of the colonials in this country, her best known book being How to See Ceylon published in 1914. Maybe being married to a planter, she missed the Bloomesbury Group and a furtherance of her writing career.
Two Great Books on Local Writers
Volume I is titled Writing an Inheritance: women’s writing in Sri Lanka 1860-1948 edited by Neloufer de Mel and Minoli Samarakkody and published in 2002 by the Women’s Education and Research Centre. Volume II is Yasmine Gooneratne’s Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing also published by WERC in 2002
Yasmine Gooneratne in her Introduction to her volume in which she lists women authors from independence (1948 to 2002), gives long and short biographical sketches about each. The author quotes Eva Ranaweera writing in the special issue of Voice of Women (2000) “neglect and marginalization of women writers has taken place over the years. For a long time women’s writing had been looked at by the critical male-dominated establishment as limited in experience and ‘womanly’ in expression as well as non-‘scientific’ in content”
How true! But how untrue that women’s writing is “limited in experience”. It’s women’s writing that deals most and best with experience and womanly expression is what lends it its unique charm. Sweeping statements for me to make, but I am certain I am correct.
No wonder many a woman hid her writing under her mattress!! There was and is ability, skill, inspiration and inspired writing but ‘outing’ with her writing many a woman fears. The Gratiaen Prize and writers collectives and journals dedicated to creative writing have, to a marked extent, eliminated this drawback.
But Sri Lankan women have not been deterred. They’ve placed themselves up front in the field of writing. Immediately comes to mind the names of the author and editor of the volumes I referred to: Yasmine Gooneratne and Neloufer de Mel, Also Vijita Fernando, Jean Arasanayagma, Punyakante Wijenaike, Anne Ranasinghe, Dr Lakshmi de Silva, and Ruwanthie de Chickera. Very many women have won the Gratiean prize since the award started in 1993.
Another factor, of course, that has held back many a Sri Lankan woman writer is her need to bread win and have her time taken up in caring for families. Women are delicate in constancy. Easier to watch TV or read a book than create with words something that may never be seen by others. So why bother may be the opinion of potential local women writers who are reluctant to face the challenge.