Feminism Read Online Free PDF Page B

her life of her husband, condemned her as ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’. And though Cavendish hopefully dedicated two prefaces specifically to women readers, urging them to spend time ‘on anything that may 22
    bring honour to our sex, for they are poor, dejected spirits that are not ambitious of fame’, she admitted that convention, in constraining women’s talents, made them jealously critical of each other’s achievements, and that she would probably ‘be censured by my own sex’. As she often was. Her contemporary Dorothy Osborne’s response to Newcastle’s Poems and Fancies is sadly revealing about the extent of disapproving prejudice – even amongst intelligent women – against women’s writing. Dorothy was enjoyably shocked when she heard about the Duchess’s book, and wrote to her fiancé, Sir William Temple:
    For God’s sake, if you meet with it, send it me; they say ’tis ten times more extravagant than her dress. Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at Th
    writing books, and in verse too. If I should not sleep this fortnight I e beginnin
    should not come to that.
    g of secular feminism
    She wrote again shortly afterwards, telling Temple not to bother, as she had already obtained and read the book, ‘ . . . and am satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’. But, ironically and rather sadly, Osborne’s own letters to her fiancé reveal a lively, observant, articulate woman; as Virginia Woolf remarked, ‘what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene’. In another age, she implies, Osborne might have made a novelist.
    Intriguingly, the seedy and cynical world of Restoration London provided some unexpected opportunities for women. They might work as actresses, though that was hardly a socially respectable profession; they were often treated as if they were, in essence, merely prostitutes. But in addition, a number of women emerged as playwrights: Catherine Trotter, Mary Manley, and Mary Pix all had plays produced – and were cruelly mocked in a play by a certain ‘W. M.’ which was staged in 1696. Mary Manley, in the prologue to her first play, foresaw the difficulties they would all face:
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    The Curtain’s drawn now by a Lady’s hand
    The very name you’ll cry bodes Impotence,
    To Fringe and Tea they should confine their sense.
    Aphra Behn is the best-known of these women who were finding the courage to break new ground, and to face down this kind of jeering criticism. Virginia Woolf glimpsed something of Behn’s importance, describing her as
    a middle class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits, she had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything she actually wrote.
    More recent readers have taken what Behn ‘actually wrote’ much more seriously – she was a skilful and often challenging dramatist –
    minism
    while some critics have found her life almost as interesting as her Fe
    plays. Before becoming a writer, she had travelled widely – perhaps to Surinam in South America; certainly, as a government spy, to the Low Countries. Though she is best known as a playwright, she also penned Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister . A recent biographer has convincingly argued that this neglected tale is in fact a great erotic novel, which is also a profound exploration of the potency and the perils of romantic fantasy.
    She was often attacked – as male playwrights were not – for bawdiness. Alexander Pope was the most famous of those who sneered at her immorality: ‘The stage how loosely doth Astraea tread/ Who fairly puts all characters to bed.’ Behn defended herself eloquently:
    Had the plays I have