Abstract
In keeping with the mood of the times sketched out above, most of the women novelists who began writing in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about the lives of young women like themselves. Among the most notable were Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and Angela Carter. The five novels Drabble published in the 1960s, when she was in her twenties, pay close — and new — attention to the physical and emotional realities of women’s experiences as lovers, wives and mothers of small children. One of the Drabble heroine’s most difficult relationships, however, is often that with her mother. More satirical in intent and style, Weldon’s early novels focus on male exploitation of women, particularly of female sexuality: like Drabble’s Rosamund in The Millstone, the heroine of Down Among the Women (1971), Weldon’s second novel, is also pregnant as a result of a single act of intercourse. While brought up in a multi-generational household of women, and free from Drabble’s sense of unease as a daughter, Weldon’s focus remains on the younger generation of women. While moving beyond realism, Carter’s novels of the 1960s similarly dissect the social and cultural forces that distort women’s aims and desires in the interests of perpetuating a normative view of femininity which provides the very foundations of patriarchy. In the 1970s Emma Tennant, Sara Maitland and Zoe Fairbairns also used innovative fictional forms through which to explore the social and psychological experiences of women of their time, focusing in particular on those years of women’s lives primarily devoted to education, love, marriage and children.1
If the young knew […]
If the old could […]
Old French Proverb
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Notes
See Flora Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists (Edward Arnold, 1989), pp. 19–24. In writing this chapter I have been greatly indebted to this incisive and judicious introduction to the subject.
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (Flamingo, 1994, first published in 1977), p. 7.
Doris Lessing, ‘Impertinent daughters’, Granta, 14 (1984), 51–68 (p. 61).
Josna Rege, ‘The child is mother of the woman: exchange between age and youth in Doris Lessing’, Doris Lessing Studies, 24 (2004), 3–7 (p. 4).
Doris Lessing, The Diaries of Jane Somers (Michael Joseph: 1984), p. iii. All further references to the novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text.
Billy Gray, ‘“Lucky the culture where the old can talk to the young and the young can talk to the old”: A conversation with Doris Lessing’, Doris Lessing Studies, 24 (2004), 1, 23–30.
Susan Watkins, ‘The “Jane Somers” hoax: aging, gender and the literary marketplace’, in Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, ed. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins (Continuum, 2009), pp. 75–91 (p. 78). Watkins cites useful examples of gerontological scholarship using Lessing’s work in this way.
Diana Wallace, ‘“Women’s time”: women, age, and intergenerational relations in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 39 (2006), 43–59 (p. 45).
Virginia Tiger, ‘Ages of anxiety: The Diaries of Jane Somers’, in Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing, ed. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis (Westport, CT: Greenberg, 1999), pp. 1–16 (p. 7).
Katie Barclay, Rosalind Carr, Rose Elliot and Annmarie Hughes, ‘Gender and generations: women and life cycles’, Women’s History Review, 20 (2011), 175–88 (p. 180).
See European Commission, ‘Older women, poverty and pensions’, Peer Review and Assessment in Social Inclusion Newsletter, 3 (2006), 1.
Mary Crawford and Rhoda Unger compare Western attitudes with images of old women in Native American legends, and in traditional Japanese culture. See Women and Gender: A Feminist Psychology, 3rd edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), pp. 442–3.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).
For example, Paula Gallant Eckard, Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2002); King, The Victorian Woman Question, pp. 161–75.
Jeanette King, Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 155.
Toni Morrison, ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’, in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 339–45 (p. 342).
See Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Revolution of an Image (Penguin, 1993).
Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Towards an Afrocentric feminist epistemology’, in Feminisms, ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 198–206 (p. 201).
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 107.
Quoted in Beloved, ed. Carl Plasa (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998), p. 35.
Roberta Rubenstein, ‘Feminism, Eros and the coming of age’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 22 (2001), 1–19 (p. 2).
Sara Maitland, Three Times Table (Chatto and Windus, 1990), p. 97. All further references to the novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text.
See Rosemary Hartill, ‘Sara Maitland: daughter of Jerusalem’, Writers Revealed (BBC Books, 1989), pp. 115–27.
See Emma Tennant, Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde (Faber, 1989) and Tess (HarperCollins, 1993).
Emma Tennant, Faustine (Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 137. All further references to the novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text.
Sara Maitland, ‘On becoming a fairy godmother: role-models for the menopausal woman’, Women: A Cultural Review, 18 (1993), 207–28 (p. 208).
Kathleen Woodward, ‘Inventing generational models: psychoanalysis, feminism, literature’, in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 149–70 (p. 152).
Linda Anderson, Autobiography (Routledge, 2001), p. 124.
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King, J. (2013). ‘If the Old Could’: Bridging the Generation Gap. In: Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292278_5
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