Why Didn't Women Write?

On the queering of the Brontes

The English Literature course I studied many aeons ago, was a very traditional one, of the kind you probably don’t encounter anymore. We started with Anglo Saxon, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, moved onto Middle English and the Augustans and Romantics and finished with Chaucer and the Victorians and Moderns. It was a very good course in many ways as it gave me a great understanding of the literary canon, as well as giving me a historical perspective. Want to know why Jacobean drama is so bloody? Take a quick look at the politics of the time, why don’t you?

One thing that was painfully obvious though, was that in this vast wealth of material very few women featured. There were none in the Anglo Saxon period (to be fair we only had eleven texts to study from), and in the middle ages Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich got brief mentions. Scroll through the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and there’s no one until you hit Mary Wollstencraft and the blue stockings. At least I thought so, until I took a course on Women Writers, where my fabulous and cheery lecturer introduced me to the writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and Aphra Behn (all 17thC) among others. I chiefly remember Sarah Churchill for enjoying her delicious diary entry in which she recalled the Duke of Marlborough pleasuring her twice while still in his boots. None of these women featured in the standard course, and it wasn’t till we reached the nineteenth century that (apart from a brief nod to Wollstonecraft) any women appeared: Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Gaskell et al were all represented, as were the likes of Woolf, Plath, Lessing etc later on. I think Maya Angelou and Alice Walker might have even got a mention, but as I was studying in the 80s there are a fair few writers who got missed off.

So my women’s writers course was a deep deep joy, particularly as I discovered the brilliance of women like Aphra Behn, who led a (by the standards of the time) somewhat disreputable life, having married (allegedly), but with no sign of a husband, been a spy for Charles II, taken a bisexual lover and hung out with reprobates like the Earl of Rochester. Even in the rock and roll era of the 1660s there wasn’t something quite wholesome about a woman either appearing on stage or even writing her own plays, but Aphra Behn managed the latter successfully. (And she wasn’t the only one, but alas many of her female contemporaries’ work has been lost). And yet… this incredible woman, who could be claimed as the first novel writer with Orinooko (a powerful anti racist piece about the evils of slavery), wrote nineteen plays, and numerous poetry, was during my time as a student completely missing from the literary canon. I was fascinated as to why and my course certainly gave me some of the answers. First, Behn was writing during the Restoration, a licentious hedonistic period after the grimness of Cromwell’s Puritan England. It was a rare time when women were allowed a little more freedom. Even so, actresses were still seen as tantamount to whores. During the period that followed there was a clampdown on such licentious behaviour and writing for women became a no go area once more. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century when the novel gained ground as a respectable source of literature that women began to be published, which is why the nineteenth century gives us such a vast source of riches.

And yet, and yet… while we have Jane Austen writing under her own name, the likes of the Brontes and George Eliot chose first to write as men. Why was that? For Austen, writing in the Regency period about balls and social standing, it was perhaps easier. The early part of the nineteenth century perhaps was not as repressive as the Victorian era. And Austen wrote about things that occupied women: love; domesticity; family. In effect, the unimportant stuff (a charge frequently thrown at women writers today). Whereas men - they wrote about battles and wars and politics - ie, the real world. They could easily stray into controversial areas and talk about social mores in a way that women simply couldn’t do. (Although even Thomas Hardy came a cropper for his later work, giving up writing novels altogether after the outcry when he published Jude the Obscure.)

So the idea that three young women from Haworth - parson’s daughters no less ! - could have first published their stories under female names without risking social disgrace is quite laughable. Both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights tackle passion and emotion in a way that Jane Austen couldn’t have gone near. It was only after they were successful that the Bronte sisters could reveal their true identities. As for George Eliot, she constantly poked at the status quo, and in Mill on the Floss shows far more empathy for dark haired ‘cute’ Maggie Tulliver who causes scandal by running away with her fair haired cousin Lucy’s fiance, Stephen Guest, before thinking better of it. Stephen of course isn’t punished in the same way. And Lucy is held up as the pure, idealistic version of what a woman could be. She’s also incredibly dull. It is hard not to see where Eliot’s sympathies lie. As well as tackling sexual taboos, Eliot also delved into the affairs of men and dared to tackle the politics of the day. Not only that, she was a single woman, living with a married man when such an act was social suicide. Is it any wonder that she used a male pen name? That the Brontes did?

And yet, if we are to believe the good folk running the Bronte Museum, who are currently running a Pride at the Parsonage campaign for Pride Month, the Brontes were queer, because of course they were. Just as according to some, George Eliot was trans, because why else would she use a male name? Now while it is true, Charlotte was the only one to get married, and true no one in Victorian England could be openly gay (although considering Queen Victoria didn’t believe lesbianism was a thing I’d have thought it was relatively easy for two single women to live together with little comment), that doesn’t mean that any of the sisters were lesbians. There isn’t a hint of same sex attraction in their writing - all the relationships are passionately heterosexual. The scandal was that they were young women writing so passionately about relationships between men and women. That is why they used male pseudonyms, not because they were queer, trans, or trying to deny their womanhood. They knew all too well that they were women, and what that meant for them in contemporary society, Charlotte even dying in childbirth, as so many of her peers did. They knew to be a woman meant to be in need of protection; to be always held up to an unreasonable ideal; and ultimately (in Charlotte’s case) to be endangered by their own female bodies.

Of course there were gay men and women hiding their true selves throughout history, and it is good that their stories can now be told. But there are plenty of them to choose from. Which is why no one should fit the Brontes into this particularly narrow narrative. It’s certainly possible I suppose that Emily or Anne may have been attracted to women, but we don’t know for sure that they were (while we do know that Charlotte fell in love in Belgium and then married, so I think the odds are fairly stacked against her being a lesbian). By seeing them through the prism of an ideological 21st century viewpoint, the Bronte Museum is doing the Bronte sisters a huge disservice. They should be celebrated for being women who flouted the mores of the time, writing books that shocked society and giving countless women since incredible role models. To suggest anything else is downright disrespectful.