[1] A paper read to The Women’s
Service League.
When your secretary invited me to
come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of
women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own
professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed;
but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My
profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences
for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage—fewer, I mean,
that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago—by Fanny
Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George
Eliot—many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before
me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to
write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a
reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the
scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and
sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare—if one
has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses,
are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the
reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the
other professions.
But to tell you my story—it is a
simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with
a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right—from ten
o’clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough
after all—to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in
the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus
that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the
following month—a very glorious day it was for me—by a letter from an editor containing
a cheque for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I
deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles
and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that
sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher’s bills, I
went out and bought a cat—a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon
involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.
What could be easier than to write
articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles
have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a
famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were
going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And
the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after
the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to
come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered
me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who
come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not
know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I
can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly
unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed
herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught
she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a
wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes
of others. Above all—I need not say it—–she was pure. Her purity was supposed
to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of
Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I
encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my
page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say,
I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped
behind me and whispered: “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about
a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter;
deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that
you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide
my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though
the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a
certain sum of money—shall we say five hundred pounds a year?—so that it was
not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her
and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to
be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self–defence. Had I not
killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my
writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a
novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to
be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions,
according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by
women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell
lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or
the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at
her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is
far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when
I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in
the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been
spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of
adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound
to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was
part of the occupation of a woman writer.
But to continue my story. The Angel
was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and
common object—a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now
that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself.
Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not
know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know
until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human
skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here out of respect
for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is,
who are in process Of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that
extremely important piece of information.
But to continue the story of my
professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and
I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat
is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor
car. And it was thus that I became a novelist—for it is a very strange thing
that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a
still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling
stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet,
if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a
novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a
novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist’s state
of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a
novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce
in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the
utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same
books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is
writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living—so that
nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round,
darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the
imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be
that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance.
I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which
for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image
that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman
lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the
water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and
cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being.
Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with
women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her
imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places
where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an
explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself
against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a
state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had
thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was
unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be
shocked. The consciousness of—what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth
about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness.
She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no
longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers—they
are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men
sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they
realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such
freedom in women.
These then were two very genuine
experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional
life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But
the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not
think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against
her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define.
Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are
there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very
different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome.
Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to
write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed
against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for
women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time
entering?
Those are the questions that I
should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon
these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are,
though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally
open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a
civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in
her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance;
for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides
this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are
fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those
aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and
examined. The whole position, as I see it—here in this hall surrounded by women
practising for the first time in history I know not how many different
professions—is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms
of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able,
though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning
your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning—the room
is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be
decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you
going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?
These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the
first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able
to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and
discuss those questions and answers—but not to–night. My time is up; and I must
cease.
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