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SOME
LITERARY
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an
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SOME L TERARY WOMEN
OF SRI LANKA
By
Eva Ranaweera
MWomen's Education and Research Centre Publication No.34/E13 - September 1991

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copyrights reserved

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We gratefully acknowledge the cocporation extended by the 15 Literary women presented here which enabled us to get acquainted with them and their literary works. They also gave their valuable time for discussion and kindly answered the questionnaire.
We say thank you to Ms. Shiranie Thambirajah and Ms. Tilaka Dissanayake for the excellent secretarial work.
A big thank you to Mr. Piyasena Bentota for the cover at such Short notice

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- *வ. ,rrowیr", -- va . -- -
Rosalind Mendis The First Woman Wovelist in English in Sri Lanka
- ܕ ܟ ܢ ܡ ܢܝ ܦ .

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Contents
introduction
Women Writers
Jean Arasanayagam
Devika Brendon Alfreda de Silva Vijita Fernando Yasmine Gooneratine Laleen Jayamanne Suvimalee Karunaratne Rosalind Mendis Anne Ranasinghe Rita Sebastian Maureen Seneviratne Lolita Subasinghe Sujatha Udugama Punniyakante Wijenaike Kamala Wijeratne
Appendix i
Questionnaire
Women Writers and the Double Standard

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NTRODUCTION
in this publication Women's Education and Research Centre (WERC) is presenting fifteen literary women of Sri Lanka who use the English language to express themselves. Among them are poets, short story writers and novelists. The oldest is 88 years and still interested in reading and writing. She feels happiest the day she can devote a couple of hours to reading or Writing. The youngest is in her early twenties.
We have not been able to reach more than these fifteen writers but we feel this is sufficient for our purpose of trying to understand the traditional gender discrimination and its impact on the English language women writers.
We assume that most of these writers belong to a class which was able to be educated in the English language and which used the language and the exposure to internationalism through it, to develop their creative talent.
Thus this survey has not fully investigated the major trends of gender discrimination which affect women. Since these writers are from middle or upper class we conclude that their daily time consuming household chores were taken over by house maids or domestic aid or members of an extended family and that they had time to spend on creative writing.
Besides the kitchen, family and domesticity, which rob a woman of her valuable time there are other factors rooted in gender discrimination which act as obstacles to women's development, be it through writing or through any other way.
We tried to understand through a circulated questionnaire the position of these literary women regarding overt and covert discrimination. Did this discrimination affect them? If so how? The questionnaire is included fathis publication ab appendiskt

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The questionnaire was framed from a social, psychological point of view incorporating a feminist dimension which was brought to the forefront when analysing the responses.
We wanted to know whether women writers encountered special problems due to gender discrimination, were their themes different to those of male writers? What made them take to writing? inner compulsion, form of escapism, loneliness, need to communicate creatively? As women, were these writers prisoners of domesticity? Would they have done better if they were liberated from this bondage? Do the books they read affect them in their creativity? Are the majority of women writers romantic writers churning out sob stories? Are they exploiters of sexuality with the market in mind? How do they find time to write? Does being the woman of the family help in writing? Do people need academic achievments to be creative writers? Who handles the business side of the writing? Are they feminists? What form of writing do they select? ls that due to available time factor? Short stories, short poems, long novels? is it a collective effort helped and encouraged by the family? Does writing help to live contendedly and are they professional writers? if not why not?
It is interesting to note that all the writers felt there was no discrimination at the point of their entry into the literary field. But in a non-traditional field like journalism there was a perceived discrimination.
it was encouraging to note that these middle class writers did not meet with any overt gender discrimination when writing. Gender discrimination did exist and does so openly and continues to this day in many ways. We have a verse from Denham's Census of Ceylon 1912 by Ruhunu Hamine, a poet of the early 19th century who was commissioned by Rev. Gogerly to translate sections of the Bible into Sinhala verse.
සීයක් හෝටි වැඩි වටි බයිබoල වදානා • දොලක් සයක් ෙනා වවිද්‍ය කව් 203 පමණි අGයත් පිරිමි කළෙ නම් තනතුරු Gදාවනා
r ලියත් කළ නිසා මණ්හී සිතට නො છે G92)2 ,

rough translation into English would run as;
"more precious is the word in the Bible than a thousand million rupees, and when in verse, is it not worth two lakhs? High position would have been bestowed if a man had accomplished this. But when it is a woman, Excellency has not even considered (her)"
This discrimination is clearly shown when we examine our ancient system of education which we have inherited. Education during pre-colonial times was the responsibility of Buddhist religious bodies. It was not available to every child and adult and it was far from being compulsory. What was compulsory was engagement in rajakariya which was based on cast and class The pirivenas where education was available were run by monks and therefore not accessible to women. From here onwards gender discrimination is to be expected. But induruwe Pannatissa Thero in his article on Education in the Pirivena Schools published in the Ceylon Historical Journal July 1951 says "Girls were also taught in most of these sciences together with singing and dancing"
The sciences referred to are grammar, poetry, oratory, languages, astronomy. law, history, rhetoric, physics, general knowledge, counselership. dhamma, sense values, logic, spiritualism, philosophy, sports, and care of elephants. Altogether 18 subjects and some of them clearly taboo for women and traditionally impossible. Note the addition of singing and dancing in a highly discriminatory context. Speaking of education in pre-colonial Ceylon Dr. Kumari Jayawardene says in Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World" - "There are recorded instances of women who were said to be well-versed in Sanskrit and Sinhala literature, but the very structure and form of education make it likely that such women from the upper strata were a rare exception; the generality of women were unlettered and uneducated......" She continues "in the second half of the 19th century the influence of the girls' high school movement in Britain was felt in Sri Lanka but this was a period when the government

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withdrew from direct management of English education preferring to leave it to the missionaries with state assistance when ever needed. The existing Girls' Superior School was closed down and a petition in 1855, which called for the opening of a Government Girls' School parallel to the prestigious boys' school - Royal College-was refused,
"The children of the poor went to the vernacular schools (boys, girls or mixed). Education in these schools was free but included only reading, writing, arithmetic, and drawing" and she concludes "The education system was thus supportive of the prevailing class
system and its ideology of women as housewives and mothers. But although the main alm of female education was to keep bourgeois women within the home as 'good' house wives, it was not long before demands arose from the women themselves, to be able to use their education professionally, in the first instance as teachers".
During the colonial period a system of bilingualism emerged slowly as a superior force to vernaculars, if this system displaced the importance given to the vernaculars, it did establish English, the language of the last colonial power, as the language of the State, its officialdom, its commerce, scholarship and international communication. With the displacement of the vernaculars Pali and Sanskrit, deeply associated with Sinhala and Tamil languages, lost prestige and influence. English the language of the rulers had its economic gains as well as its social prestige.
Bilingualism (meaning English and a Sri Lankan vernacular) was not rooted to the soil and the culture of the country. This perhaps limited the creative writing by the Sri Lankans in the English language. Those who came to the forefront were Burghers (Dutch and Portuguese descendents) who, towards the turn of the century contributed considerably to the growth of writing in English, They were Dr. Blaze, R.L. Brohler, Dr. Spittle, Dr. E.F.C. Ludowycke etc. With time even after the official displacement of the English language, the importance continued so much that it became the weapon (the kaduwa) to the frustrated youth who did not belong to the upper stream of bilingualism and suffered economically and

socially thereby. Even to those who did belong the cultural patterns and traditions were far from reflecting and governing their lives. Thus it took a long time to be able to create in English with credibility and vigour.
Of the handful that took to creative writing in the English medium, the women were far behind due to patriarchal conditions prevailing in society. That some women have blossomed out at last, to stand up to international standards, is to be welcomed.
This prevailing patriarchal condition that dominated the lives of women has reduced its heavy weight on the middle class women allowing them to come out and add rich experiences to their lives thus making it possible for them to communicate with a vast readership although the main shackles of patriarchy remain.
The primary tool of a writer is the medium through which she communicates. We have seen gender discrimination in the availability of this medium to a woman. Even if a woman succeeded in obtaining the necessary education there were other obstacles that prevented her from involving herself in creativity. As long as she remained a prisoner of patriarchy she could operate only in a limited manner within its confines. To be more experienced and productive she had to break down barriers set up by patriarchy and venture into fields termed traditionally not her sphere of activity and interest.
There is this field of shame in the Asian Contexton which a volume could be written. What better example in the operation of shame than one of our better known early women writers (1746 - 1812?) Gajaman Nona. She brandished her pen like a double edged sword to get recognition and hearing. Those influenced by patriarchy would describe her as "shameless". Her gender was a point of discussion for admission to a literary circle which she Could easily dominate with wit, humour, and creativity. To dismiss hereforts as a woman's or discuss her sexuality and seek favours, to 'shame' her were cheap strategies used by the male literati of the time. Recently she was described as a begger who begged for sustenance from foreigners - a disparaging description and

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belittling of her well known poem addressed to John Doyly an English governor asking for assistance to bring up her children. Some of her poems are a clear indication of her erudite knowledge of the technique of poetry which remained in the closed fists of the male poets.
Her rejoinders to the poems of shame remain classical examples of a challenge to the the idea of "shame" which we believe should be established in Asia since it has a written code of behaviour for women. Even to this day so many women suffer in silence subjected to pressure of shame for just being born a woman.
Shame operates through language, behaviour, insinuations etc., in
social and personal contexts. Shame language uses sexuality, obscenity, and function of the women's body as insults. Gajaman
Nona is one who stood boldly against shame language. Another gender discrimination is in acquisition of experience. If woman
remains tied to the kitchen it can be assumed that her experience will be limited to the four walls of the kitchen. Patriarchy has
dictated and laid down her field of interest to a limited narrow
space no further than the often quoted to 3ෂීවේ නුවණි ' ' • •
(length of the ladle). Thus it was ready to shout her down, to
expose the worthlessness of the writing or at best patronize her making sure to indicate what she could have done and tolerate what she finally has done.
ls it true that a woman's experiences were and are limited? She worked and works in the field from time remembered but she is not considered a farmer - she cultivated the vegetable garden, yet she is not a cultivator, she helped and helps build houses but she is no builder. She was and is responsible for the family but could not aspire to be the head of the household. Even today official forms search for gender-orientated male heads of households. It is not yet forgotten history how women's feet were bound from childhood so they could not run away from household slavery and if they did they would face sexual and other violence outside the Security zone of the masters' abode. The woman emerging from bondage voicing her equality as a human being is a loud and painful noise in the ears of Some.

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Patriarchy has not only limited the experiences of women but has also glorified experiences so limited as feminine and appropriate to the beautiful desirable female. Classification of the woman of limited experiences through literature and the media working towards an ideal concept of the role of wife, mother, lover, sister is disgustingly childish. Classical literature is sacrosanct and protected by patriarchy. For instance a girl child is brain washed into what her behaviour should be and the boy child into accepting his patriarchal, superior role. One of our most venerated of classical writers sings;
අවසර කල් රහස් බිං
coz e g toboose ocs.ge G2aozgez)
When given opportunity and privacy who is the woman who will not get involved in the "wrongful act".
She is supposed to do the "wrongful act" by herself and he who will be involved along with her is the victim who is tempted.
The concept of good woman granted her the right to enter the marriage market for which she had been geared from childhood along with careful instilling not to 'shame the family
A writer is supposed to be ahead of events and is not mearely its recorder. Since a woman writer with limited experience could not aspire to the position of being ahead of events her writing suffered long before it was written.
With ideas of democracy and human rights spreading and being accepted into the pattern of living, woman had to be given a place to justify the adherence to the proclaimed 'rights. Although there is little visible in the developed countries of open suppression of women, covertly in the house and the work place it exists.
it is relevent here to view dualism between the sexes as propagated by patriarchy.

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Anatomy is Destiny - Freud
Patriarchal Dualism between the Sexes
Femininity Masculinity
ignorance knowledge dependence independence weakness strength inexperience experience virginity masculinity house wife man of the world temptress tempted
witch bewitched bad good subjective objective follower leader passive active
inferior superior
So on and so forth.
The acceptable good woman who did not leave the house unescorted and did not associate with all and Sundry necessarily had limited knowledge of the world and its 'bad' experiences. She had to be multifaceted and gito... Over the years, it became a criteria with which a 'true laစိမှီ could be measured.
The concept of home and family contradicts feminist ideas of freedom, self development and women's rights. In order to maintain home and family base, woman and her personal development is often sacrificed for the greater good of the many. Popularising the concept of sacrifice by mothermany tele dramas are shown giving such sacrifice heroic proportion. e.g.
(යෙස්හීරාවය, ****Gඝ Gගනා මනමාලී )

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Her sacrifice is expected, desired and needed for the maintenance of the patriarchal system. The male head of the family enjoys his freedom, his rights, and personal development the propagation of which is as compulsory as the order of kingship. A woman may not get time off to read even the daily newspaper and thus the myth of ignorant woman gathers momentum.
From ancient times much pressure had been used to keep woman strictly to her home and family.
8。 The ideal woman, sacred motherhood, her divine merciful qualities, her natural so called capacity to bear pain, her tolerance and her unselfishness etc.
b. Tales of degradation and ostracisation of the 'bad' woman who betrays accepted values in seeking personal advancement, sustenance or enjoyment
C. Gradual establishment and enthronement of the deified mother image through literature, scholarship, religious and cultural activities, media, school books, preaching.
The woman thus is caught in a well knit mesh and through the years of inculcation accepts and in turn herself propagates the patriarchial system.
The system which imprisons a woman has been analyzed and exposed very effectively. It is not the biological family of mother, father, and child that is the distinguishing feature of humankinship structures."The universal and primordial law is that which regulates marriage relationships and its pivotal expression is the prohibition on incest. This prohibition forces one family to give up one of its members to another family...... The act of exchange holds a Society together........ what ever the nature of Society - patriarchal, matrilineal, patrilineal etc. it is always men who exchange Women". - Juliet Mitchell (Psychoanalysis & Feminism)
As earlier pointed out the English language, the language of a colonial power has spread over most of the world. In this country its perfect or near perfect use has been an achievement of the middle and upper classes realised through economic means. Its

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commercial value has been understood by the lower classes who too are eager to acquire this familiarity with limited aspirations.
The literary women who practice writing in English in Sri Lanka as earlier indicated belong to the affluent class or middle class. They have not felt the close and suffocating ties of the house and the family and the majority of them had found solace and refuge in the system.
Millions and millions of books of all types and categories are published and sold in the world of which English language writings take a substantial place. Some of these books sell very fast to become best sellers. Their readership is very large and is fictitiously identified as 'all women'.
"I hear that in England for instance, most of the earlier novels were written for ladies" - Lu Xun 1927.
The best seller fiction literature can be catagorised broadly into romantic, erotic and adventurous. The romantic literature is commonly accepted to cater to a gender based feminine readership. "American heroines are destined to dependency and servitude" says Wendy Martin in "image of American Women in Fiction. And adds,
"The novel reflects social definition of woman as a private Creature, reinforcing purity, piety and submissiveness as the proper feminine virtue and punishing those women who fail to comply with a behaviour code that is. economically viable in addition to being Christian...... "Fiction not only reflects and expresses social values but transmits them to future generations."
Traditional and assigned roles are given to women along with a chart of her food, her reading material, her follies, her characteristics, her clothes, her likes and dislikes, her moral code, virtues etc., etc. The critics even when accepting egalitarian status of women writers would display condescension and tolerance to

a marked degree (Refer appendix Il - Women Writers and the Double Standard by Elaine Shawalter)
The superficial romantic books put out as literature is supposed to cater to the reading needs of the women. This mythical world of romance is the opium of the reader fighting against grim reality and it cannot be totally assingned to women. It is in keeping with this assigned role and the chart that the patriarchal dualism is Created between the Sexes.
The form of writing is related to the content of writing and rightly is the writers' choice. But this choice is governed by many hidden factors; lack of time being the main realised reason. Economic dependence on means of physical survival causing stress and strain makes a person less fit to attend to Creative writing when she is free of employed work. Besides, a woman writer will have to deal with her household chores. Thus when a woman Selects shorter pieces like the short story or poem it is understood in the context of "lack of time that she had no choice regarding longer creative works and shorter easily completed ones.
If one is to make a choice between creative fulfillment and family (which is not an easy thing as many writers have pointed out) and opts to be out, the choice of the medium used by the writer minus hidden factors influencing the choice can be considered as "free choice of form. That being not so we conclude most women due to lack of time have opted for shorter forms of creative Communication.
Printing, distribution and sale of books which is a part of the patriarchal system was also taken into consideration in setting up the questionnaire. The system took woman for granted as one unable to organise, deal with financial involvement etc.
There is a contradiction in measuring the intellectual capacity of a woman with a ladle and in the expectation that she should not waste time in other work since her intellectual development is of no use to the kitchen and to those who wine and dine on her preparations. That will be selfish, personal development like

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attending to physical looks, interest in clothes, hair etc. These are
to be shunned so that all her time will belong to the household.
The distribution and sale of books remain Outside the interest of the Writers.
Eva Ranaweera.

JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
Jean Arasanayagam born, Solomons, is a major poet, painter, short story writer, novelist and dramatist.
Her main contribution to the English Literature of Sri Lanka is in her beautiful poetry of which there are six published volumes - Kindura (1973) Poems of a Season Beginning and a Season Over (1977) Apocalypse'83 (1984) A Colonial inheritance (1985) Out of our Prisons we Emerge (1986) Trial by Terror (1987) The reddened water Flows Clear (1990) the last named was published in the United Kingdom.
Born a Dutch Burgher her cultural heritage is rich indeed with Asiam and European mythology, legend and thought patterns uniting and forming a complex, varied and deep contribution to the literature of this country. According to her she gained the discipline of a classical background by reading and translating latin verse." was careful about words", she says. How true one would discover when reading her poems.
For her, writing was a way of survival. "Sometimes find myself in a situation where I am made to feel alien - an Outsider and a stranger. For a serious writer to continue writing is a serious test of Survival. Her search and achievement is in the discovery of a new language beyond the conventional structure of expression. Her sensitivity, powerful imagery and analytical conclusions bring out forcefully the poetry of her innerself and her thoughts. Her revolt against the materialistic society in "Migration", her stand for sanity, respect for life and its individuality is striking.
"... searching for that dreamtime on street after Crowded street, Learning the new patois ..."
The juxtaposition against dreamtime of the Australian aborigine with the crowded street full of the developed ones is powerfully effective. Her economic expressions and under statements are

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stretched to full capacity exploiting the utmost feelings and implications.
A Collection of short stories "The Cry of the Kite" was published in 1983. Her novel "The Outsider" edited by Le Roy Robinson was published in 1987.
Jean Arasanayagam's poems and short stories have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies in Sri Lanka and abroad. Was-usiri (U.K.) Crosscurrents (New Zealand), Journal of South Asian Literature (Michigan State University USA), Hemisphere (Australia), Pandora's Box (Japan) Falleden and Gylendal (Denmark) Sydasien and Lanka (Sweden) indian and Foreign Review, the ACLALS Anthology (U.K. edited by Dr. John Thieme) Keith Wright Memorial Poetry Collection (Scotland) New Ceylon Writing, Navasilu, New Lanka Review, Channels, Times of Ceylon Annual, poems from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore (Heinemann 1979) Homage to Justin Deraniyagala (Edited by Lakdasa Wickeramasinghe) ACLALS broadsheets.
She won the following Awards
the Sri Lanka Arts Council Prize for Non-fiction 1984 The Sri Lanka Arts Council Prize for Poetry (jointly) 1985 The Triton College international Award for poetry (1990)
Academic Achievements
She has an M.Litt from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) in Literary Linguistics and is currently lecturing at the English Teacher's College, Peradeniya.
Besides being a remarkable poet and a short story writer she is also a fascinating painter. Her paintings were once featured in the Asia Magazine and she has held exhibitions at the Commonwealth institute in U.K. The Paris Biennale, The Lione Wendt etc.
She is married into a conservative Tamil household. This clash of cultures has brought out such work as "Daughter in law,"

"Stranger" her work is disciplined, through out and complex. Be it in a line or in a long poem two strands of thought run side by side, one implied and the other direct giving symbolic, suggested values and richness to the whole thing. In the Departure from the Village,
L00LL LLLLLLLLLLLLL0L LLLLLLLLLL "we carry The depleted kuruni baskets of our lives Packed in for the final journey"
This has been achieved by systematic intellectual effort. She says "I must admit that my period of study abroad at the Universities of Nottingham and Strathclyde were of tremendous potential especially that of the New Englishness and the way we were using English in the cross cultural context. I felt had to move away from certain constraints of language, especially those of Standard English and look more closely at Lankan English.
"I think however that practical criticism is dead. Poems can be looked at, read, discussed linguistically and stylistically".
Published works
The Cry of the Kite 1983 The Outsider 1987 Kindura 1973 Poems of a Season Beginning and a Season Over 1977 Apocalypse 1984 A Colonial inheritance 1985 Out of our Prisons we Emerge 1986 Trial by Terror 1987
The Reddened Water Flows Clear 1990

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DEVKA BRENDON
Devika is the young daughter of poet and writer Yasmin Gunaratne. She is a poet and a short story writer. She is also a musician, a singer and an athlete.
"Mirrorwork" is her first published book of poems. Her short story "The Hero in my Head" was published in the Union Recorder, University of Sydney. "The Judas Kiss an urban Pastoral" was also published in the Union Recorder. Her poems "Iphigenia: Another Political Outrage" and "Phoenix" were published in the Tangent. In 1989 she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree Class 1 English. In 1988 she won the University of Sydney Union Poetry Prize. She has also baged Adrian Consett Stephen Momorial Prize for Prose, Henry Lawson Memorial Prize for Poetry and Story Prize from the same University. In 1989 she won the Australian Post Graduate Research Award offered on Behalf of Monash University. She lives in Australia with her parents.
She is the youngest writer presented here and represents the voice of youth.
Published works
Mirror work (poetry)
The Hero in my Head
The Judas Kiss
phigenia: Another Political Outrage (Tangent) Phoenix (Tangent)

ALFREDA DESWA
Teacher, broadcaster, journalist and above all poet and fiction writer, she is a Fellow of the Trinity College of Speech and Drama. She had written from childhood for children's pages and later for the pages devoted to the Young. This writing talent is continuing through out her life.
She is married and has one daughter and two grand children who illustrate her childrens' poems. Alfreda has five books of poetry to her Credit.
1. Out of the Dark the Sun. 2 Children's Poems. 3. Peacock Tree. 4. A Bit of Everything. 5. Unpredictable Blood.
She has published one book of prose "Pagoda House" Briefly the contents of the books are
1 "Out of the Dark the Sun'. is a collection of poems for all
lovers of poetry, imaginative and philosophical as in Journey
"How among a million stars can one see. The one star to
wisdom, unless it be different?
As in Departure
"Each one of us buries and is buried Many times"
2. Children's Poem rhythmic and innovative using traditional Sinhala songs as a point of departure helping the child to
step out from the known to the unknown.
Kaputu Kak Kak Kak Sings the crow to little me Seated on the papaw tree Kaputu Kak Kak Kak.
s

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New Englishineas that is accepted today bloome in Alfreda's poderns.
"My archchi said, it is a bird' My seeya said "My word, my word But said nothing because you see
few the kite above the tree.
A delightful book of song and poetry carrying you back to childhood mixing English rhymes with your own Sinhala. The outcome is splendid.
3. Peacock Tree is meant for the young and the book is out of
print.
4. A Bit of Everything - A book of beautiful poems for children
illustrated by her grand children Anushka and Manjiv Dodanwela published for the international Year of the Child 1979.
5. The Unpredictable Blood - A collection of 41 poems of varied
interest published in 1988.
Her book of prose is called "Pagoda House". It is full of childhood memories and out of every chapter and every incident emerges the powerful feminist picture of the grand mother. This unconventional grand mother devoted to the welfare of the village, arms the rural women with home crafts so that they earn something to ward off the battering and the tyranny of the drunken husbands. When her daughter marries in church it is she who gives her away playing the role so far dominated by the male.
Alfreda grew up with her grand mother. This and loneliness drove her to writing. She taught History, Civics and, English at school. She is a keen exponent of School Theater.
Her grand mother was a writer who lived in a sprawling house. She was very religious. Her writing was devoted to social problems, the spiritual quality of which Alfreda gained from her. it is visible in some of her poems. She is an introvert. She travelled

in USA on a Ford Foundation Scholarship and the experiences she got from this trip helped her in her creative work. She had a study season at the Experimental Theater and Drama School of Yale University in the USA.
She has been featured on the B.B.C. and the N.B.C. She is a regular broadcaster on the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation. She has won eight Awards for poetry from the Triton College of Poetry. She believes the ties of family are very important for children.
Published Works
Out of the Dark the Sun Children's Poems Peacock Tree A Bit of Everything Unpredictable Blood Pagoda House

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VITA FERNANDO
Vijita Fernando is a short story writer, journalist, and a researcher. She edited the Women's Page of the Daily News for decades. She tried to lift the page from purely conventional womens' concerns to a greater awareness of womens' issues. Their effect on women and children and the family, was important to her. She tried to direct the readers' thinking to intellectual concerns, to women's rights, to responsibilities and equality of opportunity, not in a military style but by appealing to the intelligence and sensitivity of WOer.
Vijita says creative writing came to her almost by accident. In the 1960s a large number of people, some known to her began writing in Sinhala mainly short stories and verse and this in turn prompted her to try her own hand. She began writing a short story in Sinhala but found it frustrating work. She started relating the same thing in English and found it worked. It was creative she felt and was satisfying. That is why she calls her creativity accidental. Thus her first short story was born.
It was broadcast on the BBC World Service. It was also published in the Sunday Observer The story was based on a woman she knew in her village as a child. The woman killed her illegitimate child. Her next story was based on a village lad who left the village for something better-he returns to the village when his dreams were shattered.
After these two short stories she found a story everywhere she looked. One of her most satisfying short stories was written six months after the 1971 insurrection and since then she has Written about twenty short stories. There are several other stories written, specially for children.
She has written and published a story in Sinhala for children. Vijita
has also translated about five hundred short stories written in Sinhala into English. They appeared weekly in the Ceylon Daily News over a number of years. Vijita says translating into English

is a joy. At the moment she is engaged in translating Monica Ruvanpathirane's poems into English.
in writing short stories Vijita feels strongly about social issues. "Women to the Middle East Syndrome" interested her as a journalist. She took up their case after a visit to the Middle East at the beginning of this exodus. Right next door to where she lives is an area occupied by the urban poor. Many women from this place have gone to the Middle East in search of better employment. Vijita began to see their problems. Her short story "Home Coming" was a result of this involment.
Sometimes a word or a phrase triggers off her imagination and she begins to write her story. All her short stories have a place' and are very real in her mind. As she writes she sees the place and the tiniest detail is in her head and she says this makes writing easy and enjoyable.
Usually the places are either known to her or she has imagined them. It is a coincidence that her stories are mostly set in the rural milieu. She believes the years she had lived as a child and a young adolescent in the rural areas have influenced her. Her thoughts keep on going back to these places and situations. Her stories are not autobiographical. According to her the places are real and the rest is fiction. The characters are mostly of the imagination though occasionally there is a skeletal of a real Creature somewhere. To Vijita the craft of writing is very important. She says writing is important but the greater challenge is to write in English as well as in Sinhala with the same amount of ease and flexibility. This proficiency in bilingualism is her greatest achievement.
The experience she got from her profession - journalism-has helped her in taking a lot of time and writing carefully with an eye to detail and accuracy.
Her short story "The Wild One" is translated into Spanish. A visit to a drug camp resulted in her writing "Circle of Power". Vijita says sex does not play a major part in her writing. She is involved with
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family and social problems. As a writer she sees both men and women are discriminated against.
Domesticity does not interfere with her job nor with her personal writing. On the other hand she considers herself quite domesticated and appreciates cooking, gardening, bringing up children all the conventional trappings of motherhood. All the men in her life, father, brothers, husband, contributed to make what she S.
She writes for her personal satisfaction, She has not pushed herself very much to get herself into print. Lack of finance was the main obstacle that kept her away from publishing her works. As she likes other people to read what she writes she is greatful to Women's Education Centre for bringing out her collection of Eleven Short Stories. She likes to know the impact her work has on the readers. She wants this to be constructive criticism. Next to publishing, the most important thing is to know the response to the published work. She appreciates group discussions and reading.
Published Works
Eleven Short Stories Circle of Powder The Wild One lmpasse
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YASMINE GOONERATNE
Poet, fiction writer, essayist and social historian Yasmine Gooneratne was born in 1935 and grew up in Sri Lanka. She holds an English Honors degree from the University of Ceylon, and a PhD in English Literature from the Cambridge University. After her graduation from Cambridge she taught English Literature at the University of Ceylon (where her husband Brendon Gooneratne was a member of the Medical Faculty) and had just begun to write poetry and see it published in British and Asian journals. University appointments in Sydney offered to them both brought the Gooneratnes to Australia in 1972 with their two children.
Volumes of poetry published prior to her removal include 1. Word, Bird, Motif. 53 Poems 2. The Lizard's Cry & Other Poems, Published in Sri Lanka in 1971 and 1972. 3.. 6,000 Death Dive (1981), a book that takes its title from a 1973 headline in an Australian newspaper, contains poems written after the family settled in Sydney: several of these poems, together with earlier work, have been published in journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas, e.g. Rosemary Dobson (ed) Australian Voices Of The 70s, and Hemisphere. They have also been heard at poetry readings and on radio programs in Australia.
A return to writing fiction took rather longer. Having first experimented in her recent book about her father's family, Relative Merits. The Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka(1986), with the idea of presenting episodes in an Asian family's 19th century history as extracts from a Victorian novel, she has resumed the genre after a break of 11 years with a series of stories set in contemporary Australia. Film rights are now being negotiated for the first story in the series, "How Barry Changed" which has figured since in readings at Harold Park and at the State Library of New South Wales.
18th century English literature is Yasmine Gooneratine's special field of academic interest: she is the author of Critical studies of Jane Austen and Alexander Pope (Cambridge University Press, 1970 and 1976), and in July 1989 was invited to deliver the
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inaugural address of the Jane Austen Society of Australia. Her books in the Commonwealth/ Post-Colonial Literature field include:
Silence, Exile and Cunning. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Orient Longman, New Delhi 1983
Diverse inheritance. A Personal Perspective on Commonwealth Literature. CRNLE, Adelaide 1980
English Literature in Ceylon 1815 - 1878. The Development of an Anglo-Ceylonese Literature. Tisara, Dehiwela 1968
Relative Merits. A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka. C. Hurst & Co., London, St Martin's Press, New York 1986 (ed) Stories From Sri Lanka. Heinemann Asia, Hong Kong 1979 (ed) Poems From India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Singapore. Heinemann Asia, Hong Kong 1979
On the academic side: Yasmine Gooneratne is ASSOCiate Professor of English at Macquarie University, New South Wales, and in 1982 became the first (and to date the only) scholar to receive the University's higher doctoral degree of D.Litt. Director of Macquarie's new Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre, she is also the Editor of the independent literary journal New Ceylon Writing, and serves as editorial advisor to six international literary journals.
Published works
Word, Bird, Motif 53 poems The Lizerds Cry and Other Poems 6,000 Death Dive
Jane Austen Alexander Pope (Critical study)
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Silence, Exile and Cunning (Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) Diverse inheritance (perspective on Commonwealth Literature) English Literature in Ceylon 1815-1878 Relative Merits (Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family)

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LALEEN JAYAMANNE
Laleen Jayamanne is a cinematographer, essayist, writer, feminist and novelist. She is best known for her knowledge in cinema and its creativity. Presently she lectures at the Sydney University in Cinematography. She is a graduate of the University of Sri Lanka in Philosophy, English Literature and Western Classics. She obtained her M.A. in Drama at the New York University U.S.A. in 1973 and Ph.D. from the Film School of Drama, University of New South Wales, Australia in 1982. She is widely travelled and is an authority on the cinema and its slant on the female.
Her book"Prodigal Daughters" written in collaboration with Sheilah Steinberg is a frank and revealing feminist novel. It is a book by a truly liberated Asian woman.
Her contribution to feminism is wide and far reaching. They range from conference papers to public talks, from films to creative Works.
She presented "Modes of Performing, Bodies and texts: Some thoughts on felmale performers" at the 2nd Australian Film Studies Conference, Nedlands, CAE Perth 1980
Production of femininity in the Sri Lanka Cinema at the Workshop on Asian Women, University of NSW, June 1981 (with Dave Sargent). "Representations of Masculinity", Sydney Film Festival Forum June 1982
Theological Feminism, or How She Got out of the Laws of
Genre via mise-en Scene Forum on "Women and Film" Australian Film Institute in conjunction with the Women's
Festival of the Arts, November 1982
Modes of performing in Resnai's "Last Year at Marienbad"
and M.Duras "Indian Song" Department of Fine Arts, University of Sydney September, 1983
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"Australian independent Feminist Cinema" for the course "Women and Society," University of Wollongong, October 1985
"Performing the Feminine, Conference on Feminist Criticism and Cultural Production, Humanities Research Centre, Australian national University Canberra May 1986
"To render the body ecstatic, empty", Art forum Program, Canberra School of Art, May 1988
A presentation on Michael Long's film "Love Like Barbara Stanwyck" on the feminist film theory forum at the Australian Screen Studies Association Conference, December 1986 NSWT
"Hunger for images; Myths of Femininity in the Sri Lankan Cinema-1947-1989" international Centre for Ethnic Studies, August 1989
Laleen has studied avant-garde performance history and theory with Michael Kirby and performance theory with Richard Schechner both editors of The Drama Review (TDR) since 1968 and also leading experimental theater directors.
Laleen's Ph.D. dissertation on "Position of Women in the Sri Lanka Cinema 1947-79 was an analysis of the asian popular cinema from a feminist perspective.
Her research interest include exploration of the problem of Cultural Differences vis-avis the visual media. This project is inflected by the interest in the question of Ethnicity and in the theme of Women and Modernity.
She directed the film "Song of Ceylon".
She is also interested in contemporary cultural theory, performance theory and visual media. She is involved with television drama and the video art.
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Publications:
"The Art Centre Theatre Studio", New Ceylon Writing, 1971.
"Sexual Politics in Pathiraja's Ponman", Lanka Guardian, May, 1979.
"An introduction to the Latin American Cinema" (in Sinhalese), Mawatha, April - June, 1980.
"Kanchana or the Future of Trash in the Sinhala Cinema", Lanka Guardian, July, 1980.
"A deconstruction of the construction and destruction of What is black and white and red all Over?" Australian Journal of Screen Theory, No 7, 1980
Modes of Performing in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. 23Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Australian Journal of Screen Theory No. 8, 1980
Modes of Performing, Bodies and Texts: some thoughts on fe/male performers", Australian Journal of Screen Theory,Nos. 9 & 10, 1981. (Based on paper read at 2nd Australian Film Conference, Nedlands C.A.E., November, 1980)
"Cuban Films at Opera House: Machismo under attack" Film News, March, 1981.
"A decade of Cuban Cinema", Lanka Guardian, May 1 981. "Every man for himself, a review of J.L. Godard's film News,"June, 1981.
"On perfoming a conference paper", Cantrills Film notes, May, 1981.
"The Holey Family", collage with text, Lip, 1981.
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Prodigal Daughters, a novel written in collaboration with Sheilah Steinberg, Champion Press, 1981, Melbourne.
"The fascination of the family melodrama", Lanka Guardian, 1981.
"The Third international Festival of New Latin American Cinema", Film News, May, 1982.
"Chantal Akerman's Les RendezVous d'Anna, a review", Film News, May, 1982.
"The Theoretical Father and the Little Girl, or Typology Revisited', Film News, September, 1982.
(with Dave Sargent) "Representations of Masculinity : Questions of Silence Laughter in Court", Film News, September, 1982.
"A Hobbyist's View of the 1982 Australian Screen Studies Conference", Film News, March, 1983.
Review of the Australian film institute'S "Fassbinder Event", Film News, April/May 1983.
"Which way to political cinema?", film News, July, 1983.
"Puppets and Puppeteers, Actors and Lovers", Cantrills Filmnotes, August, 1985.
"To render the body ecstatic" - Anna Rodrigo interviews Laleen Jayamanne", Fade to Black, "Sydney College of the Arts Film Group publication, November, 1985.
Interview with Hunter Corday on A Song of Ceylon, Film Views, Vol. 30, Summer 1985/86.
"Burning an illusion, with Sally Sayer, Films for Women, ed. C.Brunsdon, B.F.I.,1986.
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"Discussing Modernity," "Third World", and "The Man Who Envied Women", with Geeta Kapur and Yvonne Rainer. Art and Text, March-May 1987, No. 23/4.
"Passive Competence", a photo essay Screen vol. 28, no.4, Autumn 1987. Published by the Society for Education and Film and Television, Great Britain.
Contribution to "impure Solutions", by Denise Robinson. Art and Text, September - November 1987, No. 26.
"Production of femininity in the Sri Lankan cinema" in Class, ldeology and Woman in Asian Societies ed. by Lenor Manderson, and Gail Pearson, Asian Research Service 1987.
"Rehearsing, a normal sequence of a combat of sorts between 2 men and 8 photographers", a photo-essay. Cantrills Filmnotes, May 1988.
"Remembering Claire Johnston", With Lesley Stern and Helen Grace, Film news, May 1988.
"Speaking of Ceylon - a clash of cultures" Questions of the 3rd Cinema, British Film Institute 1989, ed. by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen.
"Do you think I am a woman? Ha! Do you?", a fictional
interview with Anna Rodrigo and the "Author" of A Song of
Ceylon, on the use of anthropological text in that film.
Discourse 11.2 (Spring-Summer 1989), Journal for
theoretical studies in media and culture, U.S.A.
"Image in the Heart", Framework, no. 36, Spring 1989
Work in PreSS:
"If Upon Leaving What We Have to Say We Speak" - a conversation piece with filmmakers L.Jayamanne and
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Leslie Thornton compiled by Trinh TMinh-ha, Discoursed : Marcia Tucker, Bill Olander, New York, The New Museum of Modern Art and Mr Press, 1989.
"Hunger for images: Myths of femininity in the Sri Lankan Cinema, 1947-1989." Proceedings of the work-shop, "Sri
Lanka, Four Decades of independence". International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, 1989.
Filmogrphy
Devil Dance from the Lower East, with J.Burckhardt, NYC, 1974, 16mm. 10 mins.
Works in Regress, Faith J. Burckhardt, NYC, 1975, 16mm, 10 mins.
Anna Tom - Lamentations, Sydney 1983. 16mm, 12 mins.
A Song of Ceylon, Sydney, 1985 16mm and Super 8, 51 mins. (Screened at the Sydney Film Festival 1985,
Melbourne Film Festival 1986, Ediburgh Film Festival 1986, Collective for Living Cinematheque 1988 etc.)
Migrant Eye, Wollongong, 1986. Super 8, 16 mins, Collective project with third year students.
Rehearsing, Sydney, 1987, 15 mins, Super 8. (Screened at the Melbourne Super 8 Festival and Fringe Festival, 1988).
Published Literary works
Prodigal Daughters
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SUMMA.EE KARUNARANE
She was born on 15.04.1939 and received her early education at Maret School, Washington D.C., U.S.A., where her father was posted on a diplomatic assignment from 1949-52. Afterwards she completed her formal education at Ladies' College, Colombo. Young Suvimalee travelled with her parents on their overseas assignments to Burma and Thailand. When she returned to Sri Lanka she free lanced for local english language newspapers for a short time and then joined the English Service of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation as Producer of Feature Programs, from 1972-6. Since her marriage in 1976 she has been residing in Kandy with her husband who is a General Medical Practitioner She devotes leisure time to creative writing.
Her first collection of short stories was published in Sri Lanka by Hansa Publishers in 1973 under the title "Bili Pooja" Some stories from this collection and short stories written at a later period have been included in anthologies such as "Stories from Sri Lanka" edited by Yasmine Goonaratne, published by Heinmann Education Books (Asia) Ltd., 1979, and "An Anthology of Modern Writing from Sri Lanka", edited by Ranjani Obeysekera and Chitra Fernando, published by the University of Arizona Press, 1981, "Modern Sri Lanka Stories, an Anthology" edited by Professor D.C.R.A.Goonatilake in 1986, "An Anthology of Contemporary Sri Lanka Short Stories in English" edited by Professor Ashley Halpe, published by the English Association of Sri Lanka, 1990, and "An Anthology edited by D.C.R.A. Goonatilleke being published by Penguin Books, India. Peter Hammer Berlag of West Germany brought out an anthology of Sri Lankan short stories in 1985 under the title"Mein Zerbrochenes Volk"which included a short story by Suvimalee and a Dutch publishing house, published an anthology which also included a story by her.
Some of these short stories are being used in courses on English Literature in Asia at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka and University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and also Macquarie University, North Ryde, N.S.W., Australia.
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She was awarded the prize for the best short story in 1973 by New Ceylon Writing which is a journal edited by Dr. Yasmine Gooneratne, Professor of the School of English and Linguistics, Macquarie University North Ryde, N.S.W., Australia. Her work has also appeared in "Navasilu", the journal of the English Association of Sri Lanka and the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in Sri Lanka as well as "Channels", which is a journal published under the auspices of the British Council in Colombo,
Many of Suvimalee's stories have been broadcast by the World Service of the BBC and translated into French and Spanish as well.
Suvimalee has also written a television film script "The Journey". which was commissioned by the Council for Communal Harmony for Media and televised over the Sri Lankan National Television Network She also collaborated on a film script on the life of the settlers in the Mahaweli River Diversion Scheme for the Pacific film CO of New Zealand.
At present she is engaged on a short assignment for the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, writing dramatized feature scripts for radio of a biographical nature on national figures such as Anagarika Dharmapala, for which she received recently a special commendation from the Chairman of the S.L.B.C
Suvimalee writes feature articles for the newspapers and is at
present engaged in researching for a historical novel set in the British colonial times in Sri Lanka.
Her Published works
Billipuja
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ROSALEND MENDS
Rosalind Mendis, at 88 years,frail in body but still in possession of a vibrant, crystal clear mind, today lives in contentment with her children, ranging from talented sons and daughters, to lively grandchildren and loving friends. Sri Lanka's first woman novelist to publish in English in 1928, Rosalind has a fistful of memories to fill her quiet moments. Memories of her outstanding literary achievements, of the triumphs and tribulations of motherhood, and the turbulent soundings of a creative mind.
Rosalind's very first novel, "Tragedy of a Mystery which was published in England by Arthur A.Stockwell Ltd. 29 Ludgate Hill, London, won acclaim as a submission made by a young Ceylonese woman writer. The novel was published in 1928 and the author received 500 copies as payment in kind. The book locally was a sell out.
Success does not come single handed. Reminiscing, Rosalind was full of praise for her husband who read her manuscript and urged her to see it in print. His encouragement was invaluable to her, she says. With the success of her first novel, very favourably reviewed in the English press she began a more serious work with a historical background. It was called "Nandimitra' for the writing of which she browsed extensively through ancient literature and the Mahavamsa. This book was written in the midst of patriotic fervor of the early 1950s. This book is Rosalind's favourite, but she says her fans prefer "Tragedy of a Mystery". In 1981 she published her third book, a collection of short stories, titled "My son Lia and Other Stories". One of the short stories "The Cobbler" received the highest acclaim. Some of the stories are included in the Anthology of Sri Lankan Stories by D.C.R.A.Gunatilake.
Writing gave Rosalind great pleasure to be matched only by pleasure gained from reading. She is sad now that she cannot read or write as much as she would like to do due to weakening of eyesight and failing physical health. Her happiest days still are those on which she can read for an hour or two.
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Rosalind hails from Hadeniya, a village 15 miles from Kandy. Some of the characters in the short stories come from this area. Critics appreciated two stories "The Cross Roads" and the "Cobbler" which she says were "from the heart" as it were. One Critic has compared her first novel "Tragedy of a Mystery" to Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure."
Rosalind married at the age of 19. She is the mother of two girls, and three boys. Her husband Albert Mendis who died in 1975 began the business of the now famous "Mendis Special'
After her children were born, Rosalind suddenly decided to follow a course in law in England, possibly influenced by her brother who was studying law in England at that time. This package was a daring attempt for that time This caused a furor in her family and had to be abandoned
Rosalind has a number of tragedies clouding her life. She lost her father when she was ten years old. She lost her young brother when he was 19 years old, one sister died when she was 21 and another passed away at 26, both at childbirth.
Rosalind's mind now commutes between the past and the present. As she recalls, in her younger days she was able to compose and recite on the spot poems known as "hitiwane kavi' This talent is no longer with her due to non practice. Her favourite reading was Connon Doyle's three volumes on Spiritualism. She also treasures Maccauly's Essays, which helped to perfect her English.
Young people may well detect the beginnings of feminism at its best in this first woman novelist (English) of Sri Lanka, who, in her assertion of herself, strength and determination lauded woman hood, but was feminine enough to take a delight in writing romantic novels.
Rosalind Mendis at 88 today is a living legend and a wonderful example to women who aspire to professionalism with traditional role of wife and mother. "God has showered on me so many blessings, I am content" she says.
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Published works of Roslind Mendis
Tragedy of a mystery 1928 م۔ Nandimitra - 1952 Nandimitra in Sinhala
My son Lia & other short stories - 1981,
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ANNE RANASINGHE
Anne Ranasinghe was born in Germany but as a young girl had to flee her motherland to escape the holocaust and the inhuman atrocities committed under Hitler's regime. This dark period in her life left an unforgotten mark which is reflected time and again in her Creative works.
In England she went to school and matriculated with several distinctions and two credits. Since it was Wartime Continuation of education was not possible and she did what most young Women did at the time-joined the national services where she was trained to be a nurse. She became a qualified nursing sister.
Next important event in her life other than fleeing to England was the meeting and marrying the young Ceylonese doctor who subsequently became the well known surgeon Professor Ranasinghe.
Around 1965 she followed a course in journalism and obtained a diploma.
As a young girl of ten she showed her remarkable ability to write creatively. At this tender age she wrote a play in German and it was produced. Y
This spark of creativity although not given full scope at the time for development, later when normal life resumed blossomed in her poetry and in her short stories.
She has published six books in all. A sensitive poet, short story writer and a broadcaster she continues to write giving priority to her adopted country Sri Lanka, its traditions and customs.
Her work has been translated into Sinhala, German, Hebrew, and Dutch. Her short stories, features, poems and radio plays have been broadcast and published in England, holland, Canada, U.S.A.Israel, West and East Germany, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Hongkong, india, Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka. in
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preparation is a book of poems titled - The Dream Within She won the Arts Council Poetry Prize for 1985 jointly with Jean Arasanayagam.
Anne Ranasinghe has had no special problems as a female writer. All themes interest her, Life, Love, Death and every thing connected with these broad themes.
Writing does not clash with her home and family life but it does with her working day. In other words she cannot write when she wants to but uses her spare time for this.
Because of the lack of time she reads very little fiction but manages to read short stories as they do not need much time. She reads a great deal of contemporary history, poetry, political analysis essays. At the moment she is busy with rediscovering German literature. Her very special favourite is Rilke. Second best author is Heine. She reads French poetry. She has only the night time to devote to her Creative work.
This begins at 9 p.m. She says she has no academic achievements.She had very bad experience in publishing her works. Now she handles her own publishing and distribution. She does not advertise. It is impossible to make a profit in this profession.
She believes women should have equal rights in every field. She has not been discriminated against for being a female writer. Prior to publishing she discusses her works with any one who is prepared to listen and whose opinion she values. She finds constructive criticism valuable. Writing helps her.
"it is cathartic. It helps to clarify thought and forces you to take a stance," she says.
She would love to be a professional writer but cannot earn enough to support herself.
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Published works of Anne Ranasinghe
And a Sun that Sucks the Earth Dry (1971) With Words We write our Lives Past, Present and Future (short stories and poems 1972)
Plead Mercy (poems 1975) Of Charred Wood Midnight Fear (Poems in German and English 1983).
Love, Sex and Parenthood Against Eternity and darkness (first edition July 1985 - 2nd edition November 1985)
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RA SERASAN
She is a journalist, a short story writer and a novelist. Her career as a journalist is admirable and unique in achievement. She began as a sub editor at the now defunct Ceylon Daily Mirror run by the Times of Ceylon and subsequently became the editor of the Sunday Times. This is rare for Sri Lanka and for the rest of the world that a young woman should be selected to head a news paper. This challenging role she faced creditably and dealt many an unexpected blow at male chauvinism. Her position was unacceptable to many because all that the mind was ready to accept was if a woman journalist had to become an editor it had to be the head of a woman's paper only.
Whenever an invitation to a function was extended to the Sunday Times she was asked over and over again if she would connect the telephone with the editor. A gentle reminder that it was the editor speaking rarely satisfied the person at the other end of the line. At this point a hush hush consultation took place behind the line.
Her paper offered much to the discerning reader, bright with features and informative articles. At the moment she has replaced late Richard de Soyza at the IPS after his foul murder.
She is the Colombo correspondent for the Indian Express and the IPS. Rita is a free lancer for national and international papers. Her Creative work began with the publication of a collection of short stories titled "Night of the Devil Bird'. This was ceased by the government and kept in cold storage for over an year before release on grounds that could not be maintained.
Her second book ‘A Father for My Son' deals with a problem that arises from tourism. Nevertheless it is a human problem that is related to daily living. It deals with a tourist who receives hospitality in a rural home and betrays the trust placed in him by the family and the young daughter. It is written in a gentle style and the characters that emerge are also gentle people.
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Rita enjoys writing short stories. She is another of our introvert writers who escapes from personal reality to reality of other people and finds pleasure in doing so. But her work is not escapist in nature. it is related to every day life and its happenings. She is a keen observer of people and their ways.
Regarding technique she says her worst enemy is craft. She just writes without a plan or a method. She writes down her thoughts and her ideas. However when you read her stories a clear plan is visible and a technique which makes interesting reading.
Her experiences are mostly gained from wide travelling and meeting various types of people. Her father was a down to earth simple man and a brilliant lawyer. His simple ways of living influenced Rita. She enjoyed sleeping on a mat on the floor. She lives alone since the death of her parents, brother and sister. In childhood she lived in Badulla in youth in London. At present it is Colombo and its asphalt jungle.
Academically she has a diploma in journalism. She does not react to fighting. She has been in the front line :- in and out of the Eastern province and the North when it was occupied by the Indian Peace Keeping Forces. She has a book in preparation on her experiences in the war torn areas.
She won a Fellowship for journalists to meet other career journalists. With all this bravery and challenging role she performs
she is a timid person who cannot sleep alone in her room without the maid somewhere around. She is afraid of the dark.
Published works of Rita Sebastian
Night of the Devil Bird A Father for My Son
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MAUREEN SENEMRATNE.
Maureen Seneviratne is a short story writer, broadcaster and Journalist; she concentrates writing on isssues Concerning women and children. She is married and has two children and lives on her earnings from writing as a free lance journalist.
For Maureen, the short story is the most practical, creative medium. As a great deal of other work engages her she finds, little time for longer creative works. She is a professional writer. She has written 12 books in all and continues to write more, Out of these 12 books two are Collections of short stories.
"In Search of a King" and "Not to Travel but to Love" are books in preparation, She is a prolific writer and enjoys writing. She is the only woman writer in this dossier who claims that she earns her bread and butter from her free lancing. Her book Mists on a Lake brought her the Sri Lanka Arts Council Award for the best English fiction in 1985. Her work has been published nationally and internationally, The BBC World Short Story and Commonwealth Magazine, London has published some of her short stories. Other publishers of her short stories are Quarry: University of Ontario and Hemisphere Magazine, Canberra. She is a critic and a reviewer of Creative work.
in Asia her work has been published in Pakistan and Singapore. She enjoys travelling and writing travel stories. She began her career as a writer early in life, She joined Lake House Newspaper House at 17 years of age and thus turned to professional Journalism abandoning her great desire to enter the University and follow an academic career. She concentrates on Women's and Children' issues, fighting for justice and exposing hypocrisy. At the . age of 10 she had written her first short story but her creativity upsurged much earlier. She wrote a play at 7 years and produced it with her classmates in the cast.
She is fond of reading history, archeology, and anthropology. Biography attracts her. She wrote the biography of Mrs. Srimavo
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Bandaranaike. She was awarded an UN Fellowship in journalism in 1974. Her forte remains biography and the essay.
Published works of Maureen Seneviratne
The Fleeting Emptiness.
Mists on a Lake. Some Women of the Mahavamasa Careers for Women in Sri Lanka. Srimavo Bandaranaike.
Some Mahavamsa Places. Some Facets of Sri Lanka. Tales retold from the Mahavamsa for Children. Essaying into Serendipity.
Sri Lanka and You. More Tales retold for children from the Mahavamsa and the Chulavamsa. The island Story-retold for Children (in publication)
Books in preparation for publication
In Search of a King Not to Travel But to Love
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| LOLTA SUBASINGHE
Lolita Subasinghe had been involved with writing from childhood. At that early age it was all for personal satisfaction and escape into a world of her own. Later on it became a major factor in life which gave meaning and satisfaction to her existence.
She was not an isolated creative person in her family. Her brother, late Reggie Perera, was a well known writer, a poet and a film maker. But since Lolita was a female it was not possible for her to enter the university which she longed to do. Since she could not continue with her education she retired more and more to herself. And so to writing.
Long after her marriage and the birth of her children, in 1965 she sent one of her short stories to a competition organized by the Ceylon Daily News. To her surprise she won the first prize and her entry the Twins was published in the paper. This made a remarkable change in her life. For the first time she realized that Creative writing needs a reading public and that, an appreciative public. More important was the strength and credibility it gained in her own eyes. The doors of her secret and personal domain was thrown open to the public and gradually she accepted the coexistence of the writer and the reader.
Her writing is sensitive and not so personal as one would expect by reading this. She writes about the rural people mostly. After her marriage she went to live in Sadalankawe where her husband was engaged in political activity. She had the opportunity of coming in contact with his supporters and each one was an individual to her and not a mere vote. She shared their oys and sonows. This knowledge and experience she gained helped to enrich her writings,
Her art of story telling was not straight narrative nor first person versions. They are collected bits of information which add up to make a rich story with social bearing and characters not heroic but real. Her technique creates suspense and yet credibility. She remains the detached story teller and the cohclusions are the
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reader's own. She is deftly directing the reader to the conclusions.
Her main characters are at times deceitful, at times cunning, at times hypocritical yet all the same lovable, gentle and real. The true essence of the rural peasant has been successfully captured in a few pages.
Some of her short stories have been published in the Sunday Observer. Few of these are "A Casual Affair," "The Ways of the Gods," "The House," "Juli Hamy," "Petro Dollar."
Her first collection of short stories was brought out by the
Womens' Education Centre under the title "The Twins and Other Stories."
Published works of Lolita Subasinghe
The Twins and Other Stories
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SUJAHA UDUGAMA
She was born in Matale and was the daughter of the late W.A. Udugama Dissawe and Kumarihamy. Sujatha was the youngest in the family of seven and thus became a much petted and pampered child. Her parents were always interested in keeping the family together and did not send little Sujatha to Colombo for her education as was the fashion. Instead she went to St. Agnes Convent, Matale where she took an active part in the school's literary association. She started writing at the early age of ten to the children's pages of the Sunday Observer. The Daily News, the Times of Ceylon and the Sunday illustrated. She won many book prizes for the best essay of the week
As to be expected living among the hills and the beautiful greenery of Matale she had a very happy childhood, adored by her parents and her brothers and sisters. The picturesque setting and the peaceful family life inspired her in her writing. Many were the little pieces she wrote long before she became a teenager She loved to sit out in the luscious green heart shaped lawn in front of her home and composed poetry and wrote short stories.
She wrote her first book of short stories for children when she was nothing more than a child. It was called Echoes of Lanka and a leading shop in Kandy took up the challenge and published it
it was indeed a joyful day for the little girl as well as the family. It spurred her on to write Stories of Sri Lanka - a book of folk tales and legends which she collected from the village of the Matale District. They were first published in the newspapers especially in the children's pages. When the collection grew sufficiently for a book the editor suggested compiling a book which suggestion she gladly accepted. So the Times of Ceylon published Sujatha's book, advertised it and sold it.
the whole burden of the writer been taken over by the newspaper company this little girl got royalty at a very tender age. As she says it encouraged her a great deal. She notes "Such encouragement is a thing of the past which a writer does not receive today". She
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had been working all her life, first as a journalist and then as a librarian. She had the honour of being an international civil servant for many years holding a post of the United Nations information Centre in Colombo since its inception in 1961. She was the senior reference assistant in charge of the U.N.library. She acted on many occasions and at times for long periods for the Public information Officer and was responsible for the press release, as well as for the compiling and editing of the U.N. News Letter She also represented the Centre Director at U.N.Day meetings during this period and gave talks on UN at schools etc
in 1982 Sujatha joined the Sri Lanka Rupavahin Corporation as Research Officer During this assignment she not only did research for various documentaries but also wrote several TV scripts in May 1990 she resigned from this post During this time she edited a prestigious magazine called Shanelle it had a wide circulation in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore
Besides all this Sujatha has considerable experience in broadcasting. She has given talks on a variety of subjects She compiled and presented programmes for children and teenagers Also compiled and presented a classical music programme under the caption Composer of the Week during 1987 1988 She also wrote a series of plays from the Mahavamsa until recently she compiled and presented a feature programme for broadc asting or every Poya Day it was called Poya feature and was produced by the SLBC in the early eighties she was invited by the Mahaval Authority to write for the settler's children for free distribution Some of these were Gamarala and Gamamahage (Farmer and his wife) Kimbula Meru Veva (The Lake Where the Crocodile was kied)
Hier Publications are
Echoes of Lanka for Children Stories of Sri Lanka
Dumb Prince and other Stories Sri Lanka from Legend and History
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The Holiday Story for the Young
Jataka Stories (this has a circulation in London, Washingtors
Bangkok and New York.)
Gamarala and Gamamahage
Kimbula Meru Veva.
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PUNNYAKANTE WENAKE
Punniyakante Wijenaike is one of those rare writers who inhabit one world and write convincingly of people of another world. She was born to the customs and behavior pattern of the minority elite of the island but this did not prejudice her in her assessment of the people who did not belong to it.
She was born in 1933 married in 1952 and is the mother of three children. She lost her husband in 1975.
in 1963 she published "The Third Woman" a collection of short stories. Next came "Betel Creeper and other Stories". "Giraya and other Stories" was followed by a full length novel "The Waiting Earth" The "Rebel and other Stories" and "A Way of Life" were published subsequently. Three of her short stories have been translated into the Russian language.
She worked with the Mahila Samiti edited its journal and helped at a day care centre for the mentally ill. She has received two awards locally for her writing.
(1) Woman of achievements award from the Zonta club for 1985. (2) Kala Suri award - class 1 by the President of Sri Lanka in
1988.
She had her education at Bishop's College, lived in the city and wrote about the rural poor, the peasant and the migrated domestic person employed in the houses of the affluent. These domestic persons with long years of service became institutions in the houses they served reminding us of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Punniyakante's "A Way of Life" deals with these people delightfully and lovingly. They are contrasted with the members of the household whose type of living she sees as a passing Way of Life.
in her own words she is not an academic person, married early in life she became homebound.
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"I began to Write as a pastime, a hobby a pleasuraple occupation but today it has turned into a way of lifeffor me," She continued answering a Women's Education Centre Questionnaire. "I am happy only when I write", she said.
About the distribution of her books she has this to say.
"Different people at different times handle the distribution of my books. My last book handled myself. Writing is easy but printing and publishing are difficult."
She says she is not a feminist.
"I am interested in all aspects of human nature-male or female."
Question - if you have to make a choice between family and creativity what would be your choice?
Answer - I hope I do not have to make a choice for it will have to be a difficult one.
Regarding her favourite form of writing ranging from novels, short stories, drama to poetry she says that which suits what she has to say she selects as the medium. Punniyakante does not discuss her creative work with her family nor with her printer but sometimes with her friends if they are understanding. She discusses her works with people who review them. To the question "Does a literary career help you in your life?" Answer is "Yes". It gives fullness of purpose and meaning to life. It makes her understand people better.
WERC final question which she answered promptly affects many women Writers.
Are you a professional writer?
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seven to ten times a poem and still does not feel satisfied with the work achieved. She finds sales of her works difficult to handle and
sadly admits that she cannot make a living out of her writing.
Although she was able to do her Master's in Education she is
unable to obtain her Ph D due to lak of time.
She is not a feminist in the strict sense of the term but is Sensitive and sympathetic to women's issues. Problem of domestic chores and the economic struggles have retarded her growth as a writer. There is no professional body to handle her publications and distribution. Like most women writers she does not find the time to pursue her delightful work of writing.
"Should should not Exercise that one talent And seek to multiply it?" -
That One Talent by Kamala Wijeratine
Her published works
The Smell of Araliya (1983) collection of poems A House devided (1985) collection of poems The disinherited (1986) collection of poems That One Talent (1988) collection of poems
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Not quite because t cannot seem to find the time to devote myself completely to it, May be one day I will reber against everything that obstructs devoting more time to my writing.
She has over one hundred stories published locally in newspapers and magazines.
Foreign Anthologies which have published her works:-
1. Khoctpahhar - Russion anthology 1964
2. Four Hemispheres - An anthology of English short stories From
Around the World
3. The journal of Commonwealth Literature - review of her work by
Dr Alistair Niven of England. 1977
4. Modern Sri Lankan Stories by D.C.R.A. Goonetileke 1986
5. Mein Zerbrochemes Volk (German) by Peter Hammer Verlag
1985
6. Stories from Sri Lanka edited by Yasmine Gooneratne - 1979
7. An Anthology of Modern Writing from Sri Lanka by Ranjani
Obeyesekera and Chitra Fernando for Asian Studies - 1981.
8. Non-Indian writing in English from the Indian Subcontinent by
Dr. Klaus Stuckert.
Published books
The Third Woman and Other Stories - 1963
The Waiting Earth (novel) 1966 سے Uhulana Derana (translation of above)- 1967 Giraya (novel) - 1971
4α

The Betel Vine and Call of the Sea - 1976 The Rebel and other Stories - 1979 A Way of Life - 1987
She is currently working on Stories of the Recent past-1983-1990.
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KAMALA W JERATNE
Kamala Wijeratne is a well known poet, short story writer, and an educationalist. She was born at Ulapone, Kandy. She received her education in Kandy and Gampola. She is a graduate from the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya. She followed a general degree course at the University with English as a subject.
She was a teacher for 21 years. Then she joined the Teachers' Training College as a lecturer. Later she worked at the National institute of Education.
Her individual poems have been published in the following Journals
The White Saree Channels 1 1989 Growing Wise Channels 111 1989 Bring forth Males Only New Lankan Review 1989 For KOT New Lankan Review 1989
Her poems have appeared in the British Council Anthology of Poems in 1988 and in the Lancaster Poetry Magazine.
Short Stories
A Death by drowning was published in the new Lankan Review of 1986. Making Contact was published in Pandora's Box, Nagasaki Japan. Grand Father's Tomb was also published in Pandora's Box.
Her work is less in volume mainly due to lack of time. Writing was done mainly at night after house chores were completed. Her family was not encouraging her at her creative works. They are critical of the money spent on printing.
Her stories center round problems faced by women. In addition
she is interested in the ethnic conflict, youth, and social justice. She is one who works long at a poem. Some times she rewrites
42.

seven to ten times a poem and still does not feel satisfied with the work achieved. She finds sales of her works difficult to handle and sadly admits that she cannot make a living out of her writing. Although she was able to do her Master's in Education she is unable to obtain her Ph D due to lak of time.
She is not a feminist in the strict sense of the term but is sensitive and sympathetic to women's issues. Problem of domestic chores and the economic struggles have retarded her growth as a writer. There is no professional body to handle her publications and distribution. Like most women writers she does not find the time to pursue her delightful work of writing.
"Should should not Exercise that one talent And seek to multiply it?"
That One Talent by Kamala Wijeratine
Her published works at
The Smell of Araliya (1983) collection of poems A House devided (1985) collection of poems The disinherited (1986) collection of poems That One Talent (1988) collection of poems
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Appendix i

Page 35
Questionnaire used for the study
1.
6.
10.
1.
12.
13
14.
As a female writer did you have to face any special problems or obstacles? What themes and subjects interest you? Why did you take to writing? Does it clash with your home and family life? What books do you read? Who are your favourite authors? Why? At what time of the day do you write? What place, when and how? What facilities have you to pursue a career as a writer? What are your academic achievements? Who handles your publishing, distribution. and advertising? Do you find it easy or difficult? Are you a feminist? Does it strengthen or weaken you in your
creative work? Have you to make a choice between family and literary creativity? Do you favour novels, short stories, drama or poetry? Why? Do you discuss your work with your partner? With the family?
With your parents? With your friends? With outsiders? Does a literary career help you in your life? How? Are you a professional writer? If not, why not?

Appendix ii

Page 36
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48

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Appendix iii

Page 39
WOMEN WRERS AND THE DOUBLE SANDARD
Elaine Showalter
Women writers in the nineteenth century were measured against a feminine, rather than a literary ideal. Even the term "woman Writer", in its straightforward juxtaposition of a neutral feminine term with a neutral professional one, was a paradox for the Victorians; the associations of "woman" and the associations of "writer" were too far apart to be connected without strain. So the Victorians frequently substituted other terms-authoress, female pen, female writer, and most characteristically, the delicately chivalrous term, lady novelist. Such terms served as constant reminders that women writers were a separate and inferior species of artist. Everyone expected that the female of the species would be weaker than the male; on the other hand, a lady novelist, if she behaved like a lady, ought not to be treated harshly or impolitely in a review, anymore than she ought to be forced to endure bad manners in a drawing room.
But the generation of women writers to which the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning belonged did not wish reviewers to be kind to them, to Overlook their weaknesses, to flatter them on their accomplishments simply because of their sex; in this repudiation of the courtesy ladies might exact from gentlemen, they were rebelling against the feminine ideal and all its restrictions. As long as ladies had to request masculine indulgence and protection, they could not expect to be considered as equals. Victorian women writers would not cringe and plead weakness; instead, they spoke intensely of their desire to avoid special treatment, of their wish to achieve genuine excellence and of their determination to face rigorous and impartial criticism. Most women writers felt humiliated by the condescension of critics; by what Mrs. Browning labeled "the comparative respect which means that absolute scorn". In Aurora Leigh (1856) she parodied the typical review a woman could expect:
What gracel what facile turns! What fluent sweeps!
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What delicate discernment...almost thought The book does honour to the Sex, we hold
Among our female authors we make room For this fair writer, and congratulate The country that produces in these times Such women, competent to...spell.
In part, this new spirit of pride and independence came in response to the increasingly acknowledged dominance of the novel form. Even before George Eliot had tried to write novels herself, she felt deep interest in and respect for the possibilities of the form, and had begun to consider the contributions women might make to it. She appealed to critics to exercise discrimination in their judgments, and not to be swayed by chivalry; severity, she thought, was ultimately the kindest service a critic might render the genre of the novel, and the future of women novelists. In "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", (1856) her famous satiric review of several subspecies of feminine fiction, she states her hope that.
every critic who forms a high estimate of the share women may ultimately take in literature, will, on principle, abstain from any exceptional indulgence toward the productions of literary women. For it must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into feminine literature, that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to the want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities that contribute to literary excellence-patient diligence, a sence of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the
writer's art
in this article, written just ten days before she began her first work of fiction. Amos Barton, George Eliot was declaring some of her own artistic credos and measuring her own talents against the deficiencies of the opposition. But in addition to the personal motive, one recognizes in this essay the familiar Victorian exhortations to earnestness, duty, and self-reliance. Just as the feminists were urging women to work, to make themselves useful,
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to put aside needlework and sketching for charity work and teaching, so George Eliot was attempting to get the frivolity out of fiction by frightening away the incompetent. Neither was she to be softened by pleas of financial need: "Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three women who write for vanity; and besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances".
Addressing herself directly to women, Dinah Mulock Craik, a novelist of far more modest abilities than George Eliot, expressed nonetheless the same ideals of artistic integrity and the same scorn of the dilettante. Women must not deceive themselves about their abilities; they must not confuse their feminine and their professional roles. "In any profession", Mrs. Craik wrote, "there is nothing, short of being absolutely evil, which is so injurious, so fatal, as mediocrity... Therefore, let men do as they will-and truly they are often ten times vainer and more ambitious than we:-but I would advise every woman to examine herself and judge herself, morally and intellectually, by the sharpest tests of criticism, before she attempts art or literature, either from abstract fame, or as a means of livelihood".
Undeniably, personal ambition and frustration throbs fiercely
beneath the surface of these statements on literary women. What
was the use of laborious dedication to one's art if any moralizing
fool enjoyed an equal critical esteem? Why bother to achieve
perfection when one's efforts would be greeted with compliments
cheaply obtained by any woman who was willing to make herself
an object of pity? Privately, they might be indignant at the rudeness of reviewers, or resent the demands made upon them by
publishers, editors, and families; self-pity was not foreign to them.
But publicly, as Mrs. Craik maintained, they agreed that "to exact consideration merely on account of her sex, is in any woman the
poorest cowardice".
A striking evidence of this change in the attitudes of women writers is the use of the pseudonym. Where the eighteenth-century
51.

authoress modestly concealed her identity by publishing anonymously, or by signing only her preface, her Victorian counterpart frequently attempted to deceive the public by assuming a masculine name. Although Jane Austen, for example, never publicly acknowledged her authorship, she did not conceal her sex; the title-page of Sense and Sensibility (1811) showed the author to be "A Lady". Jane Austen was proud to be classed with such reputable writers as Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth. But the ambition of the Brontes, or of George Eliot was quite different. in the biographical notice of her sisters' lives which Charlotte Bronte wrote for the 1850 edition of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, she explained their choice of pseudonyms:
Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Action Bell, the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because-without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called "feminine-we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward a flattery which is not true praise.
Although anonymity had long been a defense against unladylike publicity, and, as kin the case of Sir Walter Scotte, a way of protecting one's literary reputation when the novel was still a low genre, the Bronte sisters were among the first women writers in England to adopt masculine pseudonyms. Mrs. Gaskell had published three short stories under the name "Cotton Mather Mills" in 1847; Mary Barton (1848) was published anonymously, although a letter to her publisher shows that she was thinking of using the pen name Stephen Berwick. Why did the masculine pseudonym appear so suddenly and become so widespread? There was, of course, the example of George Sand, who was probably second only to Goethe among foreign authors influencing Victorian literature. In 1847 she would have been the most inspiring model
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for a woman writer of independent spirit, and Charlotte had certainly read her novels. The Bronte girls, however, were a law unto themselves, and from childhood they had been accustomed to assuming masculine roles and names in their games of imagination. Charlotte had used several masculine pseudonyms in her Angrian chronicle; Charles Thunder, Charles Townsend, and Captain Tree were some favorites. ۔۔۔ ۔۔۔
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the practice of anonymity on title pages and in periodical journalism lost favor and was thought cowardly, but among women writers it increased. The Brontes' example was widely imitated; although George Eliot is the only woman writer of the period who is remembered by her pseudonym, there were dozens of novelists, minor then and forgotten now, who used masculine names: "Holme Lee", "J.Masterman", "Hamilton Murray" in the 1850s and 1860s; "Lucas Malet" (the daughter of Charles Kingsley) in the 1870s and 1880s; and later stijl, "John Oliver Hobbles", "John Strange Wilhter", "Martin Ross", "George Egerton", "Vernon Lee", and "C.E.Raimond". The practice spread to the United States, where in the 1880s Mary N.Murfee, writing under the name Charles Egbert Craddock, deceived not only the public, but also her publishers, for six years. As her brother explained, "The name was assumed as well for a cloak in case of failure as to secure the advantage that a man has in literature over woman. He obtains a quicker reading by the publishers, is better received by the public in the beginning, and altogether has an easier time of it in England women also continued to publish novels anonymously well into the latter half of the century; among them was Rhoda Broughton, who did not sign her first novel, published in 1867.
in addition to the professional risk of encountering reviewers' bias, women writers also faced the personal danger of having their fiction read as autobiography. Without anonymity or a pseudonym, they found separation of their work and their private lives impossible. Even these defenses did not preclude scandal and gossip. Because Charlotte Bronte dedicated Jane Eyre to Thackeray, whose wise was in a hospital for the insane, the rumor
53

spread that Thackeray was Rochester, and that Becky Sharp was Currer Bell.
George Eliot's case was especially delicate. AS Mary Ann Evans, she had acquired a reputation in literary London for political and religious liberalism which had made her some enemies; as editor of the Westminster Review she had offended certain factions. More seriously, by living with a married man, George Henry Lewes, she had put herself outside the boundaries of Victorian respectability, and she did not dare to sign her real name to novels that preached the message of duty and renunciation. All those most closely involved with the publication of Adam Bede-Lewes, the publisher John Blackwood, Grorge Eliot's old friends-tactfully avoided the subject of her connection with Lewes. Lewes himself, writing to Blackwood, emphasized the wish to avoid critical bias: "When Jane Eyre was finally known to be a woman's book, the tone noticeably changed". When they decided to abandon the incognito, Lewes wrote proudly to George Eliot's friend, Barbara Bodichon, that "it makes me angry to think that people should say that the secret has been kept because there was any fear of the effect of the author's name. You may tell it openly to all who care to hear it that the object of anonymity was to get the book judged on its own merits, and not prejudged as the work of a woman, or a particular woman. It is quite clear that people would have sniffed at it if they had known the writer to be a woman, but they can't now unsay their admiration..."
Subsequent events proved that Lewes' fears about antifeminine prejudice affecting reader's responses to the books were justified. But he and George Eliot were much more frightened of possible moral outrage. The Blackwoods too were apprehensive that announcement of authorship would injure the chances of future novels by George Eliot, especially sales to families. while she was finishing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot became so anxious and sensitive that she wrote to Blackwood's asking if they wished to remain her publisher since her identity had become known. John Blackwood's reassurances were directed, albeit discreetly, to her fears of scandal: "As to the withdrawal of the incognito, you know how much have been opposed to it all along. it may prove
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a disadvantage, and in the eyes of many it will, but my opinion of your genius and confidence in the truly good, honestreligious, and moral tone of all you have written or will write is such that I think you will overcome any possible detriment from the withdrawal of the mystery which has so far taken place".
To summarize, the women novelists were both fearful and defiant of the Critics; they expected a certain amount of derision and hostility; they took precautions against personal attack if they could; but they had a keen sense of professional and artistic responsibilities, and where these were involved, they would not make concessions or ask for favors. Men shook their heads over female stubbornness and professed themselves mystified by the new spirit of pride and self-reliance. "We might forgive her intolerance, for it is a ladylike failing", a critic wrote of Harriet Martineau, "but she will accept of no allowance on account of sex. Editors and publishers discovered, to their amazement and often chagrin, that the most gentle and feminine lady novelists could turn tough-minded and relentless when it came to business. Mrs. Gaskell's refusal to change her work to suit Dickens' preferences in Household Words was one such instance, showing her confience in her own writing and her resolve to fight for her artistic freedom. Unused to such rebelliousness, Dickens made no Secret of his anger. "Mrs. Gaskell-fearfull-fearful. If were Mr. G., oh, Heaven how would beat her" it took the combined efforts of John Chapman and George Eliot to persuade Eliza Lynn to tone down the love Scenes in her novel Realities; and neither Geraldine Jewsbury nor Rhoda Broughton was willing to surrender a word. Even Mrs. Craik, one of the most docile and conventional women novelists, demanded financial justice from her publishers and could write a sharp letter when the situation required it.
Fiction was a caling for which they might take up arms without sacrificing their own sense of feminine duty. Writing demanded freedom from the tyranny of self; so long as they had to worry bout their novels' being used as evidence for or against them, they felt stified. Charlotte Bronte wrote to Lewes that "come what will, cannot, when write, think always of myself and what is elegant
55

and charming in femininity; it is not on those terms, or with such ideas, ever took pen in hand".
But the pressures of public opinion were ineScapable, and all the women writers were to feel and suffer from them. First of all, the code of feminine behavior was class-oriented. Its cruelest pretense, as Kate Millett has pointed out in Sexual Politics, was that all women were "ladies", members of a leisure class. The requirements of gentility were barely compatible with anyo professional ambition on a woman's part, although it was tacitly accepted that in the lower classes women labored in the mines as will as the mills. A Victorian women writers, in fact, came from the middle or upper class; there were no milkmaid poets or shopgirl novelists. For women of the upper classes writing was regarded as a harmless occupation so long as it remained an avocation. Literary ambition, however-the wish to publish one's writing and maybe make money from it-was not wholly respectable for women until the middle of the century. Harriet Martineau, for example, tells in her Autobiography that she rejoiced when her family went bankrupt: ", who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way; for we had lost our gentility".
The obligations of gentility were not the only barriers to feminine ambition. From childhood, girls were taught that women were created inferior to men in body and in mind, and that God had commanded woman to submit to masculine mastery in return for economic, emotional, spiritual protection and guidance. Most Victorians believed that women's inferior role was their punishment for Eve's crime, and rebellion against it was un-Christian. god's message to women, as recorded in Genesis 3:16, was explicit: "I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in Sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have dominion Over thee".
Women were therefore destined to find fulfillment in a sphere of life
lower than men's. Yet they were told that culture, leisure, and education might produce from female nature a being of the highest
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stature to which such a nature could aspire. As the Westminster Review Summarized it in 1831, the feminine ideal meant that
Woman...is formed to obey, and though she have an active and exclusive part to perform, still she must perform it under submission to her lord. Her duties are confined to her home, and consist in ministering to the comfort of her husband, and in educating her children during their early years. To perform these duties will, she must have a docile, patient and submissive spirit, she must possess no elevated description of knowledge, as she is gentleلn her temper, so she must be inferior in her attainments.
Women were created to be dependent on men; their education and training must prepare them to find and keep husbands. Their mental qualities, therefore, should be those which would "stimulate the instincts and soothe the feelings of men"; modesty, delicacy, liveliness, and sensibility. women should be truly religious, in order to influence their husbands and children; they should be ignorant of the evils of the world, in order to preserve their purity of spirit; in short, they ought to preserve their purity of spirit; in short, they ought to present in every way a contrast to and an escape from the harsh intrusive realities of human vanity, greed, and sensuality. The feminine ideal combined elements of the angel and the slave.
The widespread acceptance of this impossible ideal from the eighteenth century on made life very difficult for women writers, especially if they came into open conflict with society's dictates. First, there was the question of motive; a proper woman did not seek fame. Her special virtue was modesty. Then, literature was in some degree an exposure of self, and a truly modest, delicate woman would shrink from the scrutiny of strangers. Therefore, the act of publication alone made a woman suspect.
Furthermore, the Victorians had inherited a set of negative stereotypes of women, expressing many of the qualities which women writers were likely to embody. The two most common of these were the bluestocking and the old maid; frequently they were combined. The stereotype of the woman writer, which began to
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develop early in the nineteenth century, drew upon these older prejudices. In contrast to the ideal woman, the bluestocking-oldmaid-woman writer was seen as tough, aggressive, pedantic, vain, and ugly.
As individuals, women writers were understandably loath to class themselves with the bluestockings, or to agree that they lacked feminine charm and virtue. But individual compromises, and for that matter, individual triumphs, had little effect on the stereotyped. image of the woman writer. Women writers themselves were often the first to attack the sisterhood; and, to adapt Jane Austen's query, if the authoress of one novel be not patronized by the authoress of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? No doubt jealousy played a large part in this mutual disapproval, as well as the desire to win masculine support; by condemning the audacity of women writers en masse, they hoped to emphasize their own socially acceptable femininity. The feminine ideal, therefore, divided women writers and kept them from making a forceful, united response to the hostile stereotypes.
Becausee they were so susceptible to the self-doubt engendered by theideal, most Victorian women writers also conspicuously repudiated the feminist movement, eventhough they were basically sympathetic to its aims. Few were willing to battle the public hostility toward feminism. Nonetheless, conservative reviewers were quick to associate an independent heroine with a concealed revolutionary doctrine; several found Jane Eyre to be a radical feminist kdocument, as indeed it was. For Charlotte Bronte, however, who had demanded dignity and independence without any revolutionary intent, and who considered hereself the meekest of Christian Tories, such critism was an affront. Her bad experience served as a warning to other women writers. As group they were so cautious in their statements about feminism that in 1851, Harriet Taylor, the future wife of John Stuart Mill, attacked them anonymously in an article on "The Enfranchisement of Women":
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The literary class of women, especially in England, are Ostentatious in disdaining the desire for equality or citizenship, and proclaiming their complete satisfaction with the place which society assigns to them exercising in this, as in many other respects, a most noxious influence over the feelings and opinions of men.... (whom they) believe hate strength, sincerity and high spirit in a woman. They are therefore anxious to earn pardon and toleration for whatever of these qualities their writings may exhibiton the Subjects, by a. studied display of Submission on this...
Her accusations stung Charlotte Bronte, who wrote to Mrs. Gaskell that their feelings on the review were the same: the author "forgets there is such a thing as selfsacrificing love and disinterested devotion... To many women affection is sweet, and power conquered indifferent, though we all like influence won".
Although both Charlotte Bronte, and Mrs. Gaskell were using their novels to protest against specific wrongs in the condition of women, neither wished to be involved in legal and political reforms. Mrs. Gaskell believed that women should be rebellious and aggressive only in the interests of others; a mother might fight for her children, but not for herself. Furthermore, she distrusted social legislation generally; what was needed, she felt, was a change of heart. Many brilliant and competent women had so completely accepted the myth of female inferiority that they had no faith in their own sex and considered themselves superior exceptions. George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example approved of feminism in theory, but could not believe that Victorian women were ready to assume the responsibilities of equality. Mrs. Browning, a political liberal who wrote against American slavery and for Italian liberation, and whose verse novel Aurora Leigh was attacked as propaganda for women's rights, wrote, nonetheless, that she was not "a very strong partizan (sic) of the Rights-ofWomen side of the arguent.... I believe that, considering men and women in the mass, there is an inequality of intellect, and it is proved by the very state of things of which gifted women complain, and more than proved by the manner in which their
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complaint is received by their own sisterhood". Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Craik, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and Christina Rossetti were violently opposed to the movement; Mrs. Linton and Mrs. Oliphant even wrote against what the latter called the "mad notion of the franchise for women".
Although they were opposed to female emancipation, women
writers supported innovations and reforms in women's education. Until 1878 women were not allowed to study at Oxford and
Cambridge. Girls received on kind of secondary education; boys
another; so that knowledge of Latin and Greek became a symbol
of intellectual achievement for Women.
Not thought, but feeling was held to be the woman's forte, and the Victorians especially distrusted women's pretensions to abstract thinking. Emotional prejudice, they believed, disqualified women from objective judgments upon such matters as history, philosophy, and government. Again and again in the journals, reviewers attacked women attempting philosophic discussions. Physical and intellectual weakness were associated, as we can observe in the following comment on Mrs. Hofland's The Czarina (1843): "Women have no business whatever to dabble in historical romances....(they) are no more capable of conceiving the abstract idea of a mind which is framed for the rise and fall of empires than they are physically constituted to play a prominent part in the revolutionary drama when it opens". Similarly, affection and partiality, however charming in a wife, are repellent in a scholarly endeavor: "Ladies who assume masculine functions must learn to assume masculine gravity and impartiality".
Obviously, hearing such sermons preached from childhood would eventually affect women's estimates of their own capabilities, and thus many women writers concurred in this unfavorable opinion of their own sex. As Mrs. Gaskell put it, "I would not trust a mouse to woman if a man's judgment could be had".
Among women writers, educational backgrounds ranged from
Margaret Oliphant's simple lessons from her mother to the expensive tutoring enjoyed by Elizabeth Barrett. George Eliot
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studied music, drawing, French, history, arithmetic, and English composition from the Misses Franklin at Coventry. Charlotte Bronte, after her brief, disastrous experience at Cowan Bridge (the School which became the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre), spent happy years at Miss Wooler's School and later in Brussels studied French at the Pensionnat Heger, under the guidance of the fiery M.Heger. Young Elizabeth Barrett wrote her first poem at age four; at thirteen she spent eight hours a day at her studies which included French, Italian, Latin, and Greek; the classic she studied With her brother's tutor.
Compared to the opportunities men enjoyed, the formal education of these women was perhaps not extensive. None of them attended a university; but then, neither did Branwell Bronte or George Eliot's brother Isaac. And they read omnivorously; they taught themselves languages, Subscribed to journals, and ordered books or borrowed them. Through discipline and dedication, they made use of leisure, of isolation, even of loneliness and rejection. There is Elizabeth Barrett, suddenly an invalid at fifteen, mastering, over a ten-year period, German, Spanish, and Hebrew. George Eliot, caring for her widowed father in Nuneaton, studied German, Italian, and Latin, and read theology, history, fiction, poetry, and science. Much later, she showed this same enviable ability to use periods of forced seclusion for study, instead of wasting them in nostalgia or self-pity. In the years 1855-1858, during the long period of Social ostracism, when, because of her honest avowal of the union with Lewes, she was not invited to dinner", she read, in Greek, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ajax, the Oedipus triology, the Electra, the Philoctetes, and the Aeschylus trilogy; and in Latin, Horace, Virgii, Cicero, Persius, Livy, Tacitus, Piautus, Quintilian, and Pliny. Her knowledge of the classics, Gordon Haight believes, was "more solid than that Thackeray got at Charterhouse and Cambridge, probably wider than that Trollope got at Harrow and Winchester
it is easy enough, therefore, to see why women writers were often thought to be bluestockings. Gentlemen meeting Mrs. Browning or George Eliot for the first time expected them to be shrill, domineering, and masculine, and in accounts of these meetings
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there is often a note of pleased surprise that, instead, Mrs. Browning was a "quiet little person" (Hawthorne); a "modest sensible little woman" (Coventry Patmore), who would sit with the boring wives and let the men "discuss the universe" (D.G.Rossetti). Tennyson commented on George Eliot's "soft soprano voice" (he had probably expected a baritone), and john Fiske exclaimed in astonishment," never saw such a woman. There is nothing but to mother babies". These two women, however, were thought to be exceptions, and the species of women novelists was still expected to be both ignorant and pretentious.
Despite increased Social acceptance of women writers towards the middle of the country, working conditions were dependent on the attitudes of an older generation that had been brought up on the feminine ideal and had passed it on to their daughters. The Brontes, Charlotte Yonge, George Eliot, and of course, Elizabeth Barrett Browning obtained their youthful ideas about proper feminine subservience and dutifulness from their exigent fathers; Mrs. Oliphant and Harriet Martineau received the doctrine from their domineering mothers; and these early lessons they never unlearned completely. The attitude and expectations confronting Charlotte Bronte at the beginning of her career are implicit in a correspondence she had with Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate, in 1837. She had asked his opinion of her poetry; Southey answered that it showed talent, but he advised her to give up thoughts of becoming a poet, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation". Humilated, and yet grateful for his concern, Charlotte Bronte answered him in a pathetic letter that Speaks dramatically-even melodramatically-of her daily agony of renunciation of imagination and ambitions. Explaining that she tried to curb her imagination by working with all her energy as a governess, she wrote:
carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity which might lead those five amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits. Following my father's advice-who from my childhood has counselled me just in
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the wise and friendly tone of your letter- have endeavored not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfill, butto, feel deeply interested in them. I don't always succeed, for sometimes when I'm teaching or sewing would rather be reading or writing; but try to deny myself, and my father's approbation amply rewarded me for the privation. ܗܝ
No woman writer in the nineteenth century dared consider abandoning domestic responsibilities, however tedious, distasteful, and menial, for her art. The poorer ones, like the Brontes, peeled the potatoes; those with servants, like George Eliot, still kept close watch over the linen closets and the silverware.
Reconciling the parallel currents of work and female duty took great energy Probably the exigencies of female authorship balanced its social advantages, needy women who were too dull or too timid to choose other work may will have been attracted to novel-writing, as George Eliot scornfully suggested; but a threevolume novel, even a bad One, could not have been written without some degree of concentration and endurance. Even successful professionals, like Margaret Oliphant, worked under deplorable conditions: "up to this date", she wrote in 1888, "I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and don't think I have everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life". A room of one's own, Virginia Woolf's symbol of artistic autonomy, was yet to be earned.
An even more insidious outgrowth of the feminine ideal was the characteristically Victorian veneration of motherhood. In its extreme form, this doctrine proclaimed motherhood the entire purpose of a woman's life. As the feminist pioneer Frances Power Cobbe lamented, many to a son has fulfilled her 'mission, the celibate woman-be she holy as St. Theresa, useful as Miss Nightingale, gifted as Miss Cornwallis, has entirely missed it
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Because maternity was regarded as the highest office a woman could attain, and because motherhood allegedly conferred mystical gifts of wisdom and moral infallibility upon its votaries, women writers were more respected and admired and got better treatment from the critics if they were also mothers. Even women who were quite revolutionary in other respects grew dewy-eyed and mealymouthed when the subject of maternity came up. The same Frances Power Cobbe who is quoted above in protest against the idealization of maternity insisted that mothers must not dream of activity beyond the domestic sphere until their families are grown:
So immense are the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and thoughts, that she cannot, I believe, meet them all and find any large margin beyond for other cares and work. She serves the community in the very best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving birth to healthy children, whose physical strength has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and mental nature she can give the whole of her thoughts."
Mrs. Marsh, Mrs Oliphant, Mrs. Gaskell, and Mrs. Browning got on very well with conservative critics who never tired of reminding readers that these ladies were mothers.
Geraldine Jewsbury and Charlotte Bronte were less fortunate. In the unkindest cut of all, Lewes Criticized Charlotte Bronte's portrayal of Mrs. Pryor in Shirley, attributing the defects of the characterization to the author's childlessness. Lewes argued that no mother would abandon her child because it resembled its detested and depraved father. "Currer Bell" cried Lewes, "if under your heart had ever stirred a child, if to your bosom a babe had been pressed, - that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest of it was drawn, in which your soul was transported and absorbed-never could you have imagined such a falsehood as that! No wonder Charlotte Bronte wrote to him after this review," can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends".
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in the hands of a real reactionary, the maternity argument became even more absurd and repressive. In his review of Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth is a mother, and the duties of hallowed motherhood have taught her own pure soul what its blessings may be to the fallen". No admirer of "women authors as such... certain creatures of the female sex, withink half-way up their fingers, and dirtyshawis, and frowsy hair", Ludlow suggested that for decency's sake, only married women, preferably mothers, and apparently those of middle age, should write novels:
By this time, with family cares upon their hands, and the moral responsibilities of their now completed life upon their consciences, to write and to print will be no more temptations to their vanity, and it will be for them to judge whether they are really called upon to say something to the world-whether they have that to say which their husbands will gladly hear, which their children will never blush to read; and whether their calling be to works of fiction or to the severest exercises of thought, we are sure that the little faxen heads at their knees will add a truth and a charm to matter and style alike, though it be only through the instinctive erasure of those hard words which Willie does so cry over in his lesson.
Secure in matronhood, Mrs. Gaskell gleefully called the review "delicious", but to Charlotte Bronte and to many other lady novelists, it must have been bitter indeed.
As if this preference for motherty mediocrity were not enough, women writers also had to contend with the prejudices associating them with feminists and other political radicals. Most dangerous of . these stereotyped associations was the identification of professional women with the birth control movement. In the 1840s Malthusian doctrine was almost universally regarded as diabolical. A woman who publicly supported Malthus had to expect abuse; she was, the Victorians thought, not only wicked, rebellious, and profane, but very probably perverted. Harriet Martineau's espousal of Matthusian philosophy (in the unfortunately titled Monthly
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Novels) put the Quarterly Review into hysterically righteous rage: "A woman who thinks child-bearing a crime against society"
Behind such outbursts was the uneasy fear that women who were given attractive alternatives to marriage and motherhood would take them, and that the proud race of Britons would wither away. This persistent anxiety explains, think, the seemingly excessive angry response critics so often made to the books of single women that took issue with traditional social patterns. When women began questioning the structure of Society, Critics thought, they might end by destroying it.
in the case of women writers, the problem of family versus career seemed particularly insistent, because literary creativity seemed to rival biological creativity in the most direct way. The terminology of childbirth had been used to describe artistic Creation for centuries, and the creative impulses of parenthood and authorship were familiarly spoken of as identical. Using this old joke, Thomas Moore wittily, cruelly, and anonymously attacked Harriet Martineau in a "Blue Love Song" in the Times:
Come we with me, and we will write, My Blue of Blues, from morn till night. Chasd from our classic souls shall be All thoughts of vulgar progeny; And thou shalt walk through smiling rows ---Of chubby duodecimos,
While I, to match thy products nearly, Shall tie-in of a quarto yearly.
And so on, for a dozen more lines. The obvious implication was that the bluestocking woman writer was barren and unsexed. All Harriet Martineau could do in her own defense was refuse to speak to Moore at parties.
Finally, there was the widespread belief have already mentioned,
that motherhood and authorship were essentially competitive and therefore incompatible activities. Creative energy was thought to be
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finite; children claimed so much of it that no good mother could have much left to spare for fiction. At any rate, she would have less than a man. The unfairness of this theory is plain; it failed entirely to allow for individual variations in personality and circumstances. But Mrs. Gaskell cited it in a letter advising a young mother not to write until her children were grown. Not only was it likely, Mrs. Gaskell thought, that a writing mother might neglect her real children for her imaginary ones, but also that a mother would be a better artist for having waited and endured and grown through the trials of maternity:
The exercise of a talent or power is always a great pleasure; but one should weigh well whether this pleasure may not be obtained by the sacrifice of some duty. When had little children I do not think could have written stories, because should have become too much absorbed in my fictitious people to attend to my real ones. think you would be sorry if you began to feel that your desire to earn money, even for so laudable an object as to help your husband, made you unable to give your tender sympathy to your little ones in their small joys and sorrows; and yet, don't you know how you, how everyone who tries to write stories must become absorbed in them, (fictitious though they be) if they are to interest their readers in them. Besides-viewing the subject from a solely artistic point of view, a good writer of fiction must have lived an active and sympathetic life if she wishes her books to have strength and vitality in them. When you are forty, and if you have a gift for being an authoress, you will write ten times as good a novel as you could do now, just because you will have gone through must more of the interests of a wife and mother.'
Even if she had no children, a woman was expected to lag behind men because of physical problems. In particular, Victorians generally believed that menstruation was a disease that made all women invalids for much of their lived Until the twentieth century all but the most advanced medical authorities believed that during menstruation women were incapable of physical of intellectual exertion. Although convention forbade discussion of menstruation in polite journalism, it is often discussed discreetly in accounts of the problems of women's colleges, particularly in the United States.
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As late as 1878, the British Medical Journal printed a correspondence on the subject of the contamination of meat by the touch of menstruating women. Probably menstruation is one of the elements G.H.Lewes had in mind when he wrote that "for twenty of the best years of their lives-those very years in which men either rear the grand fabric or lay the solid foundations of their fame and fortune-women are mainly occupied by the cares, the duties, the enjoyments and the sufferings of maternity. During large parts of these years, too, their bodily health is generally so broken and precarious as to incapacitate them for any strenuous exertion".
All in all, women were told that their instincts, their organic processes, their brains, and their religion commanded conformity to the domestic pattern. Again these doctrines weighed most heavily on single women, who were made to feel that their struggles to find meaningful and profitable employment for their lives were ultimately futile. And there was a real belief single women who wrote were merely seeking an outlet for their pent-up emotions and fruitless passions. Attempting to explain the creative impetus, G.H.Lewes wrote of the lady novelist, "if the accidents of her position make her solitary and inactive, or if her thwarted affections shut her of somewhat from that sweet domestic and maternal sphere to which her whole being spontaneously moves, she turns to literature as another sphere".'
In short, no matter what they did, women writers were told that they could not hope to equal the achievements of men. if, like Mrs. Gaskell and Mrs. Oliphant, they fulfilled their domestic responsibilities, they were at a theoretical disadvantage with men, who could dedicate themselves wholly to their art. If, like Charlotte Bronte and Geraldine Jewsbury, they were unmarried, their work was nonetheless interrupted by the periodic debility of menstruation. If the woman met her maternal obligations, she would exhaust her creativity. If she devoted herself to art instead of having children, the art would be mere compensation; it would secondary and inferior; wish fulfillment. Thus, by 1845 critics, both male and female, came as a matter of course to expect that novel by a woman would in all probability be inferior to that of a man.
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At the confused, hostile, and repressive aspects of the Victorian concept of femininity had their outlet in the criticism of women writers. By the late 1840s, when the Brontes and Mrs. Gaskell, among others, were submitting their manuscripts to publishers, an entire separate and prejudicial critical standard for women's writing had divolved. Through the 1850s and 1860s this criticism, both theoretical and specific, increased in response to the large number of important novels by women that were appearing. Hardly a journal failed to publish an essay on woman's literature; hardly a critic failed to express himself complacently upon its innate and potential qualities.
Victorian critics agreed that if women were going to write at all, they had best write novels. "Of all departments of literature", G.H.Lewes wrote, "fiction is one to which by nature and circumstances, women are best adapted". Theories of feminine aptitude for the novel tended to be patronizing, if not insulting. According to the theory of female nature, women had a natural taste for gossip and trivia; they were sharp-eyed observers of the social scene; they enjoyed getting involved in other people's affairs. All these traits of the female character found a happy outlet in the novel. This view, as grudging toward the novel as toward women, is usually expressed in a tone of mock admiration: "Women... have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance"'
in passages like this, the critic giveth and the critic taketh away; the least difficult, least demanding response to the superior woman novelist was to see the novel as the instrument that transformed feminine failings into virtues. What mattered was the channeling of these unfortunate interests and impulses. Women were dominated by sentiment and obsessed by love; well, sentiment and love were carefully in his 1853 review of Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth:
flow, if we consider the novel to be the picture of human life in a pathetic, or as some might prefer the expression, in a sympathetic from, that is to say, as addressed to human feeling, rather than to human taste, judgment, or
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reason, there seems nothing paradoxical in the view, that women are called to the mastery of this peculiar field of literature. We know, alt of us that if man is the head of humanity, woman is its heart; and as soon as education has rendered her ordinarily capable of expressing feeling in written words, why should we be surprised to find that her words come more home to us than those of men where feeling is chiefly concerned?"
By eliminating from his definition of the novel all the qualities he could not bring himself to grant to women, Ludlow could accept the success of the books without having to alter in the least his feminine stereotypes. So intent is he on showing the perfect compatibility of the stereotype and the real 1 oduct, that he can dismiss the question of "expressing feeling in written words" as the merest trick of the literate.
"The Lady Novelists of Great Britain", a discussion in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1853, is another good example of the typical mid-Victorian tone, doubly offensive in this case because the reviewer so plainly believes himself to be a model of broad minded generosity: "Nothing ....moves us from our belief that novel-writing is quite one of the legitimate occupations of women. They cannot, indeed, fetch up materials from the haunts into which a Dickens or a Bulwer may penetrate. They may in vain try to grapple with the more complicated difficulties of many a man's position and career; but, as far as they go-and often they can and do go far-they are admirable portrayers of character and situation". And so on, for three smug pages.
George Henry Lewes' article, "The Lady Novelists" (1852), repeats the traditional distinction that the masculine spirit is intellectual, and the feminine spirit "emotional facts of life", women are likely to succeed in it, although philosophy, history, and poetry, the more intellectual branches of literature, would exclude all but the exceptionally gifted. Lewes maintained that the sexes possess separate but equal literary abilities. Great and lasting works, such as the novels of Jane Aistem and George Sand, could be produced with the materials domestic experience provided. But not
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even Jane Austen could have written so intellectual a work as Vanity Fair. The best praise Lewes could grant a woman writer he bestowed on Jane Austen (he had not met George Eliot yet); she knew her limitations, used to the fullest the distinct abilities she commanded, and never tries to invade masculine territory.
Another essay of more than ordinary interest is "Novels by the Authoress of John Halifax", R.H.Hutton's review of Dinah Mulock Craik's novels Hutton devoted threefourths of his review to an analysis of "the main characteristics in which feminine fictions, as distinguished from those of men, are strong or defective". Hutton's first point concerned the narrative structure; in a woman's novel, he thought, all the narrative interest derived from the characters, whereas in men's 6vels the characters were placed in a broad intellectual framework and related to a general idea which dictated the composition of the narrative, such as Scott's contrast of history and the present, or Thackeray's satiric attack on his society. Hutton felt that women's novels had a special intensity which came from their strictly organized plots and invitation to identification with the characters. But this intensity was transitory, since it was intellectually limited. Accordingly, he considered Dickens a "feminine" writer: his genius "was founded on delicate powers of perception alone, though lighted up with something broader than feminine humour. There is no intellectual background to his pictures: and in this respect he resembles the numerous authoresses of modern English fiction".
Lack of imagination, rather than lack of experience, was for Hutton the major deficiency of the woman writer. When applied to character, this judgment meant that women excel at social detail, at creation of characters externally observed, but fail at depicting inner life. The exception to this rule is the central character, whose psychology is usually convincingly portrayed. Unless, in fact, the protagonist is the narrator of a pseudoautobiography, the typical woman's novel is out of proportion in be presented in depth. Lack of imagination also accounts for the general failure of women to portray realistic male characters. The very powers of observation that aid Women in capturing the external aspects of character
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prevent them from reaching below the surface and discovering the truths of the hidden personality.
Although much of what Hutton says is reasonable as criticism of Mrs. Craik, his general theories are biased by his selection of examples; he bases his theories about women novelists essentially on inferior novels, whereas his ideas about the abilities of the sexes are not much more significant than comparisons of national literatures. The curious and important aspect of these essays, however, is the degree to which their generalizations were assimilated and turned into absolute standards. During the period from 1845 to 1865 especially, reviewers were virtually obsessed with finding the place of the woman writer and with putting each woman writer in her place. This obsession usually took the form of persistent determination to expose the female authorship of a pseudonymous or anonymous work. Reviewers found the challenge of detection innesistible; and they enjoyed the pose of omniscience. The more women writers resorted to disguise to win fair treatment from the Critics, the more critics focused on the question of sex.
The double standard of literary abilities overwhelmingly favored men. Like the Social stereotype to which it was closely related, the literary stereotype adapted very slowly to any real evidence of the feminine character; but these talents were outbalanced by their limitations. Feminine talents included refinement, tact, and the ability to observe precisely, present female character effectively, deal knowledgeably with details of dress, housekeeping, and illness (this last a not inconsiderable element in Victorian fiction), and most important, edify the morally needy. Feminine failings were lack of originality, lack of education, inability to comprehend abstract thought, excessiveemotionality, prejudice, humorlessness, and inability to portray male characters.
All the most desirable artistic qualities were assigned to men: power, breadth, distinctness, clarity, learning, understanding of history and abstraction, shrewdness, knowledge of life, and humor. Masculine faults were seen to be coarseness and passion; the latter term was used in its Victorian pejorative sense of
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licentiousness. This distribution of literary qualities meant that a man who approximated the stereotype could conceivably write an excellent novel, but a woman with all the qualities agreed to be essentially womanly could produce only a superfical work.
This double standard was so widely accepted that critics and readers automatically employed it in the game of literary detection. Approaching a novel as if it were a chemical to be identified, reviewers would break it down into its elements, label these masculine or feminine, and add up the total. A predominance of masculine or feminine elements determined the Sex of an author. The rigidity of this method of criticism is equaled only by its unreliability. Sagas of mistaken identity are legion throughout the century; considering the odds based on chance alone, the percentage of correct guesses is not impressive. Women were no more accurate detectives than men.
The two most famous cases involving the use of male pseudonyms by female authors were the controversies attending the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847, and Adam Bade in 1859. These two works threatened the soothing stereotype of feminine incompetence with the reality of feminine genius, and they engendered a critical response extraordinary for its intensity and ambivalence.
What chiefly astounded and baffled the readers of Jane Eyre was the presentation of feminine independence and female passion. According to the ideal, women did not have the sexual feelings "Currer Bell" (Charlotte Bronte) described. According to the double critical standard, moreover, women writers could not attain the powers Currer Bell displayed. Therefore, as Mrs. Gaskell reports, "The whole reading world of England was in a ferment to discover the unknown author... every little incident mentioned in the book was turned this way and that, to answer, if possible, the muchvexed question of sex".
The critical verdicts were contradictory, to say the least. Most reviewers, judging by the book's vigor, declared the author to be a man. Others, examining circumstantial evidence of domestic life, insisted that the author must be a woman. Still other reviewers,
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scandalized by the accounts of passion, announced that the author must be a fallen or depraved woman, an outcast from her sex. One American reviewer solved the dilemma by imagining that Jane Eyre was a team effort by a brother and sister, with the brother handling plot, characters, and passion, and the sister fitting in delicate detail and sensibility. Even defenses of the book were obnoxiously insistent on distinctions of sex, arguing that Currer Bell was so innocent and ladylike that she had not realized the meaning of her Own Words.
Most significantly, many critics bluntly admitted that they thought the book was a masterpiece if written by a man, shocking or disgusting if written by a woman. In an angry rebuttal of these reviews, written to her publisher, Charlotte Bronte eloquently defended her human and literary rights: "Jane Eyre is woman's autobiography; by a woman it is professedly written. If it is written as no woman would write, condemn it with spirit and decision-say it is bad, but do not eulogize and then detract... To such critics would say, "To you I am neither man nor woman- come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me-the sole ground on which accept your judgment!"
Like Jane Eyre, Adam Bede was an instant success, and once again, all of England was in a furor to discover the identity of the author. This time readers were virtually unanimous in supposing the author to be a man. As the Saturday Review later admitted, "to speak the simple truth, without affectation or politeness, it was thought too good for a woman's story". In fact, a male "George Eliot" was quickly located-aclergyman named Joseph Liggins, who lived in the town where Mary Ann Evans wan born, and who was more than willing to claim credit for her books. Cheerfully, he gave interviews and accepted the homage of visitors, forcing the real George Eliot to reveal her pseudonym. Immediately the tone of the reviews changed. Where critics had previously seen the powerful mind of the male George Eliot, they now, upon second giance, discovered feminine delicacy and tact, and here and there a disturbing unladylike coarseness.
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Arguments ad feminam in periodical reviewing were so characteristic of the years from 1840 to 1870 that could not begin to list them all. Many of the most talented women writers of the period were criticized for "coarseness" or a lack of ladylike refinement. Anne Bronte's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which described the suffering of a woman married to an alcoholic, Scandalized James Lorimer of the North British Review with its "coarseness and brutality". But the reviewer for Fraser's found charm in what seemed to him only a feeble and innocent imitation of masculine power: "The very coarseness and vulgarity is just such as a woman, trying to write like a man, would inventsecond-hand and clumsy, and not such as men do use; the more honour to the writer's heart, if not her taste". With typical Bronte spirit, Anne replied in her preface to the second edition, "All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man".
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was called by the Edinburgh Review "often.... more coarsely masculine than any other woman writer". Again, then objection was to her diction. Her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857)-one of the few works by a woman, incidentally, with a woman writer as its heroine-was considered especially daring and unorthodox. The Westminster Review commented, in a typically personal and offensive manner, "Mrs. Browning seems at once proud and ashamed of her womanhood. She protests, not unjustly, against the practice of judging artists by their sex; but she takes the wrong means to prove her manhood. In recoil from mincing fastidiousness, she now and then becomes coarse. She wil not be taxed with squeamishness, and introduces words unnecessarily, which are eschewed in the most familiar conversation. To escape the imputation of over-refinement, she swears without provocation".
Women reviewers were just as likely as men to disparage the
female novelist or to draw attention to her personal qualities. George Eliot, after all, had herself written about "Silly Novels by
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Lady Novelists"; the two reviews which hurt Charlotte Bronte the most were by women: Miss Rigby in the Quarterly and Anne Mosley in the Christian Remembrancer. Mrs. Oliphant, who suffered most of her professional life from a bitter sense of literary inferiority, could be a harsh critic of her sister novelists. One of the saddest aspects of prejudice is the way in which it affects the selfimage of its victims. Women writers were all too ready to believe that they labored under innate handicaps of mind and experience. Even the most successful seemed to require continual reassurance. Lewes confided to a friend that "After the publication of 'Adam Bede' Marian felt deeply the evil influences of talking and allowing others to talk to her about her writing.... there is a special reason in her case-it is that excessive diffidence which prevented her writing at all for so many years, and would prevent her now, if
were not beside her to encourage her".
The effects of this repressive criticism were serious and extensive. First, it denied autonomy to women writers by insisting on treating them as a class, rather than as individual artists. This knowledge that their identity was always in danger of being subsumed to a group stereotype acted as a constant irritant. They were anxious to detach themselves from its onus by expressing relatively conservative views on the emancipation of women and by stressing their domestic accomplishments. The stereotype, however, was ineScapable, and women were perpetually frustrated when the novels they considered expressions of their own unique personalities were treated as representatives of a trend. At Mrs. Gaskell's request, Charlotte Bronte asked her publishers to delay Villette so that it would not appear simultaneously with Ruth. "... I have ever held comparisons to be odious", she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, "and would fain that neither nor my friends should be made subjects for the same.... dare say, arrange as we may, We shall not be able wholly to prevent comparisons; it is the nature of Some Critics to be individous; but we need not care: we shall set them at defiance; they shall not make us foes..." As she predicted, despite their efforts the two novels were reviewed together in many journals. Women writers were thus forced to be rivals.
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More significantly, women were either implicitly or explicitly denied the freedom to explore and describe their own experience. While Victorian prudery prevented men as well as women from expressing themselves, it operated much more oppressively on women, because virtually all experience that was uniquely feminine was considered unprintable. Considering the outraged response of Critics to Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh, it is sad but not surprising that no nineteenth-century woman writer dared to describe childbirth, much less sexual passion. Men could not really write about Sex, but they could write bout sport, business, Crime, and War, all activities from which women were barred. It is no wonder that no woman produced a novel like War and Peace. What is amazing is the wealth of literature, passionate, witty, and profound, written by women in this period.
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NOTES
1.
George Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", Westminster Review, 66 (1856):460.
. Dinah Mulock Craik, A Woman's Thoughts About Women
(New York, (1858),P. 53.
E.F. Harkins and C.H.L.Johnston, Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books (Boston, 1892), p. 82.
. G.S.Venables, "Miss Martineau", Blackwood's 48 (1840):
181.
Annette B.Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London, 1952), p. 152.
"The Education of Women", Westminster Review, 29 (1831): 71.
Harriet Taylor, "The Enfranchisement of women", Westminster Review, 55 (1851): 310.
Gordon S.Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York, 1968P, p. 195.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte (London, 1919), p.125.
10. Josephine E.Butler, ed., Woman's Work and Woman's
Culture (London, 1869), p. 8.
11. Frances Power Cobbe, The Duties of Women (Boston,
1881), p. 190.
12. G.H.Lewes, "Currer Bell's Shirley", Edinburgh Review, 91
(1850): 165.
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13. J.M.Ludlow, "Ruth", North British Review, 20 (1853): 90-91.
14. "Miss Martineau's Monthly Novels", Quarterly Review, 29
(1833): 151.
15. Letter of September 25, 1862, in Letters of Mrs. Gasle;,
ed.J.A.V.Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester, England, 1966), pp. 694-695.
16. See Elaine and English Showalter, "Victorian Women and
Menstruation", Victorian Studies, Fall 1970.
17. Lewes, op. cit., 155.
18. Lewes, "The Lady Novelists", Westminster Review,57
(1852): 133.
19. bid.
20. E.S.Dallas, "Currer Ber, Blackwood's 87 (1853): 19.
21. Ludlow, op. cit., 90.
22. "Novels by the Authoress of John Halifax", North British Review,
29 (1858): 384-406.
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Dr. Kumari Jayawardena Bernadeen Silva
Selvy Thiruchandran Eva Ra naWeera
Publication No. 34/E/13 Women's Education & 37 A. Kinross Avenue, Colombo 4. Sri Lanka.
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(ks 40) =
Research Centre,
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