The Situation for Women Writers

Though the situation for women writers has changed radically since her time, a recent LitHub article makes the argument that “we will always need Virginia Woolf.” Speaking as a “common reader,” Emma Knight writes that Woolf’s fictions and legacy have the capacity to attune us to the inner life amongst the vicissitudes of contemporary noise. During the period of her own creative peak, Woolf called repeatedly, and justifiably, for novels that would depict “what women do.” In A Room of One’s Own she famously called attention to the way the very circumstances of women’s lives—which to her mind so cried out for the act of poeisis—most often prevented women from rendering their own circumstances, relationships, and milieux in art:

We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time.

In light of this it seems reasonable to wonder what Woolf would have made of the legacy of Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, whose work and life spanned divides Woolf implicitly considered all but unbridgeable. Thanks largely to her own talent and drive, by 1922 Undset had secured to herself the equivalent of Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” her chalet in Lillehammer, and “five hundred a year,” through the Norwegian National Author’s Salary, to begin work on her masterpiece, Kristin Lavransdatter, which won Undset the 1928 Nobel Prize. Not until 1929 would Woolf publish A Room of One’s Own, calling for women novelists to take up the work that Undset—while still in the “washing and teaching” stage of motherhood—had already proven could be done, and with wild success. While Woolf was singing Shakespeare’s sister back into being, Undset had already fulfilled her own early ambition to be “a woman artist, and not a pen-wielding lady,” her own early insight that “everything wants its own life.”

Undset’s and Woolf’s lifespans overlapped significantly: Both were born in 1882 and died only eight years apart—Woolf in 1941 during the Second World War, Undset in 1949, just after it. Both women’s lives were threatened and turned upside down by that conflict: Woolf’s studio was destroyed in a bombing barrage, while Undset was forced into expatriation and lost her eldest son, who died defending his home village in Norway. In part because of the stress of the war, both women enjoyed their most productive years—accompanied by critical recognition and financial success—in the 1920s and 30s. Yet as individuals, they could hardly have differed more. Woolf sympathized with progressive politics and social movements, while Undset positioned herself as a skeptic toward both (though she also vocally opposed Hitler and was exiled from her beloved Norway for so doing). Woolf’s name became nearly synonymous with the then-incipient “women’s movement,” while Undset publicly defended the value of stable marital and familial relationships over totally open-ended self-determination. The contrasts between the two women continue: Woolf was prone to ill health, both mental and physical; Undset had the good fortune of stubbornly robust energy and relentless productivity, despite unpropitious circumstances.

These differences make it all the more remarkable that Undset, working in Norwegian, wrote precisely the kind of novels that Woolf, working in English, implored women to begin to write. It is tempting to wonder whether, had translations been available to her, Woolf would have recognized a response to her own call in the fruits of Undset’s passionate, hard-won genius.

Undset addressed and examined the same dilemmas of women’s daily lives, familial constellations, and social dynamics that fascinated and attracted Woolf, often from the perspectives of working-class women or of middle-class mothers: perspectives Woolf herself could only imagine in works like her early novel Jacob’s Room, her entertaining short story “An Unwritten Novel,” and her innovative technical triumph To the Lighthouse. Such lives seemed to tease and tantalize, yet also to finally elude, Woolf’s genius, which more successfully cast light instead into the inner worlds of characters like the privileged society hostess Mrs. Dalloway, the protean point-of-view character of Orlando, and the bohemian artist Lily Briscoe, all of whom seemed closer to Woolf’s own heart. The comic turn in “An Unwritten Novel” and the tragic turn in To the Lighthouse both center on Woolf’s self-acknowledged failure to comprehend what could motivate, what could finally console, a middle-class mother of children for the multifarious trade-offs and personal diminishments that seemed to inhere in her role. Woolf seems to grasp after, and ultimately fail to find, what could possess such a woman to choose and act as she has chosen and acted.

This is not a blind spot Undset shared. Many of Undset’s most skillfully painted female characters are also wives and mothers whose destinies are deeply shaped by the expectations others place on them. Undset shone at depicting the kinds of women’s lives that have frequently been neglected or ignored in Western literature. Though Woolf often sought to empathize with more mundane, anonymous lives, it’s hard to argue that these efforts coincide with her most successful creations; the effect of Woolf’s oeuvre speaks instead of a greater delight in the exceptional and sensational. By contrast, Undset drew on experience to imagine her way into a variety of personalities wildly different from her own—such as Ingunn, the bride whose fate is a central bone of contention in the Olav Audunsson tetralogy. Ingunn, diffident and labile, objectified by the men of her family but given her full characterological scope by Undset, seems equally trapped within her flesh and within her role. She is unable to generate the energy to transcend the demands of either. Her one chance at exercising a positive influence in her society is embedded within her capacity for fidelity to the marriage vow she has made. In this light Ingunn’s talent for intimacy—characterized by a highly tuned emotional susceptibility, and frustratingly met by a complete sidelining and lack of support from her community—comes to appear as a tragic flaw. Ingunn’s archetypally feminine responsiveness, when neglected, devalued, and dishonored, ultimately works to the detriment of the marital commitment it could equally well have nourished and strengthened. As Undset reveals the mechanism by which the relationship devolves, she places judgment neither on Ingunn nor on her social context, though she shows how both are complicit in the loss of an original, almost Edenic, good that could have been.

Asked why the “marriage plot” attracted her as a subject, the young Sigrid Undset had this to say in a 1908 letter to her friend Dea:

I can’t say that any “problems” interest me, just people, and it’s most often marriage that is a person’s fate, at least for women. It would never occur to me, for example, to write a book in order to portray an ideal “marriage of conscience”…I’ve never seen this in practice and I’m absolutely convinced that it wouldn’t make things any better. But as I’ve told you, I’m thinking about a story of two people who have to live their lives outside marriage…who adapt and constantly have to conform and comply and keep encountering new obstacles…There are also some themes from the old, bloody days that I’ve been thinking about.

It’s possible to see in this quote the embryonic stages of several of Undset’s works, including, the bildungsroman Jenny, the modern conversion story in the two novels of The Wild Orchid; and her best-known, most beloved stories of Kristin and Erlend, Olav and Ingunn. Looking at Undset’s historical fiction, scholars have debated whether these works genuinely reflect “the medieval view of love” shaped by writers like Jean de Meun and Christine de Pizan, or merely Undset’s view of human relationships, with its characteristic blend of medieval and modern insight. Whichever view we take, it’s hard to ignore the profound psychological realism her characters embody—which, in turn, may reflect psychological ways of being-in-the-world that Undset herself reflectively considered while working out the ramifications of the peculiarly modern pressures under which she labored.

At times Undset parallels Woolf by depicting a modernity that tends to engulf, enmesh, and distort the souls it holds in its matrix. But for her finest works Undset turned to a time in history in which gender roles were so thoroughly taken for granted as to be unquestioned, so that she could depict characters who were not to any extent flattened and compromised by the pressures of the modern world. The relative starkness, the reduced terms of that society enabled Undset to center her characters and flesh them out in relief against the backdrop of their natural world, where Woolf’s seem nearly coterminous with their artificial, contemporary environment, if not constantly on the verge of being swallowed up by it. Take for example Undset’s best-known and most beloved heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter. Even as Kristin’s story is shaped around the natural life of the body, it resonates with a kind of scope, liberty, and agency that Undset’s modern novels, like Woolf’s, tended to paint as more difficult for many women in modern life to access. Though marriage and maternity feature prominently in Kristin’s narrative, they are neither the only nor the highest values to which Kristin’s life ultimately relates: Kristin is a leader in her community, a peacemaker among troubled political factions, and above all a soul in relation to the divine. Kristin embodies Edith Stein’s insight that

a common creativity in all areas was assigned in the original order…The fact that all powers which the husband possesses are present in the feminine nature as well…is an indication they should be employed in corresponding activity.

Living before the fractures inherent in the modern “buffered self,” Kristin’s “porous self” can be at once distinctive and common, creative and conventional. Kristin’s self-transcendence is not a matter of acquiring public distinction based on achievement—as was Undset’s own self-transcendence—but of pouring herself wholly into her roles only to find that there is more of her self to be poured than she originally thought: not self in the sense of ego, but self in the sense of authentic inner life. As early as 1901 Undset was laying out the plan for this endeavor, again in a letter to Dea:

God’s joy in creating, which is enjoyed by everyone who creates in words, in colors, in notes, and in clay, maybe even every craftsman when he creates the smallest object that pleases him—that joy can be won by anyone who secretly shapes his own self and opens his eyes; so often we keep them closed—eyes that look inside the workshop of our lives.

In the century since Woolf and Undset were at their peak, women’s writing has tended to take this precise turn toward the “workshop of our lives,” with varying degrees of success. Neither limited to nor ignorant of the important but circumscribed sphere of domestic life, the finest women’s writing tends to highlight the ways in which private and public life intersect, overlap, and coinhere.

For this and other reasons it is a particular joy to participate in the Collegium Institute seminar on a finely crafted novel by a contemporary woman writer hailing from Africa: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. Without the trailblazing work of writers like Woolf and Undset, we as readers might be less well prepared to find in Kambili Achike what Undset calls “a woman’s courage and pride and fidelity and veracity” as she tells her own story with the tenderness, grief, and love it merits. As Undset tells Dea in another letter: “Everything wants its own life.” In her story of losing her own life and finding it, Kambili, like the heroines of Woolf and Undset, joins literature’s panoply of Isabel Archers and Catherine Slopers and Maisie Faranges, its Dorothea Brookes and Gwendolen Harleths, its Sethes, Pecola Breedloves, Roberta Fisks and Twyla Bensons: those women who, as Henry James has it, “insist on mattering” over against every pressure that falsely tells them they cannot: who, with fictional lives that parallel realistic ones, witness to the inalienability of human dignity in all its variety.

 Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things, a quarterly journal of ideas, art, and Catholic faith. She is the author of As Earth without Water and Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord