William Dalrymple and Colin Thubron recently talked of the travel narrative as a snapshot of a place at a given time. Like any snapshot it soon becomes dated, then it gains fresh life as history, documenting landscapes and customs that may have disappeared.
The analogy holds beyond travelogues, as I found when I picked up Ellen Moers’s Literary Women , first published in 1963 and last edited in 1976. No scholar would get away with that title today for a book about only White American, British and European writers, but as a snapshot it was riveting. Moers pulled women writers apart from the general study of literature and talked of them as travellers, artists, performers, lovers and storytellers.
Hers is not a broad survey of the subject. For that I look to my old Women’s Literature A-Z , which covers every literary woman, at least as of 1992, from Malak ‘Abdel’ Aziz to Fay Zwicky. With all that it fits comfortably on my lap while I cross diverse genres, countries, centuries, and ethnicities over an afternoon.
Moers’s work is limited in more than ethnic scope, being confined to two or three centuries and to poetry and novels. Everyone we expect within those limits is in this snapshot. The writers of the “female gothic”, a term first used by Moers, catapulted their heroines into Italy, the 18th century’s heart of darkness. Austen put vulgar numbers to the kind of income a woman needed to live a respectable life. George Eliot wove a dense web between provincial families, capturing the dairy farmer as richly as she did the gentry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s heroine struggled to write her epic and realized that the desire to move one beloved man rather than the multitude makes a woman’s art impotent.
Moers’s snapshot also includes faces that have since disappeared from the women’s lit landscape. Germaine Necker de Staël created the fictional poet Corinne, who did not scribble verses in private but performed them on the streets of Rome. We seldom hear of Madame de Staël today. Another writer features in Moers’s most intriguing chapter, on woman as priest, teacher and commander. Madame de Genlis, called le Gouverneur rather than governess because her pupils were the royal Bourbons, wrote educational tales told by a fictional mother incarcerated with her children in a castle. After each story the mother elicits responses from them and chastises them to build their character. Like a Russian doll, Madame de Genlis reveals another teacher-storyteller within her, just as she herself is revealed by Ellen Moers. Her pedagogical mother is a sterner version of Mrs March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women . These authors often sent the men out of the way before they got down to business, whether that business was the writing of an epic or the shaping of the next generation.
Both Moers and A-Z say the works of Madame de Genlis were entertaining, though they go by the dreary name of morality tales or courtesy books. If only they hadn’t disappeared.
