Feminize Your Canon
June 16, 2018 6:50 PM Subscribe
The Paris Review's new monthly column, Feminize Your Canon seeks to explore the lives and works of women writers who have achieved less attention and/or appreciation than one might think they ought. First up: Lapham's Quarterly's Emma Garman profiles 20th-Century British novelist, poet, and reviewer Olivia Manning.
Manning may have bristled at the notion that she was artistically ahead of her time; what use was that when she had bills to pay? But her spare, unsentimental, and sometimes highly original fiction, with its “unlikable” characters and documentarian’s realism, is more aligned with current tastes than Murdoch’s eccentric flights of fancy. In postwar Britain, it was only the “angry young men” such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne who were celebrated for their irreverence. The title of Amis’s debut, Lucky Jim, was, to Manning’s mind apropos. Her “difficult” personality was deemed a liability, but her legitimate anger and sharp candor might have been career assets in 2018.
Manning's more noted works include the The Play Room (published as The Camperlea Girls in the US), The Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes), which were based on her experiences in Athens and Bucharest during World War II, and The Levant Trilogy (The Danger Tree, The Battle Won and Lost, and The Sum of Things). She also wrote poetry and non-fiction, including Remarkable Expedition: The Story of Stanley's Rescue of Emin Pasha from Equatorial Africa.
Manning may have bristled at the notion that she was artistically ahead of her time; what use was that when she had bills to pay? But her spare, unsentimental, and sometimes highly original fiction, with its “unlikable” characters and documentarian’s realism, is more aligned with current tastes than Murdoch’s eccentric flights of fancy. In postwar Britain, it was only the “angry young men” such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne who were celebrated for their irreverence. The title of Amis’s debut, Lucky Jim, was, to Manning’s mind apropos. Her “difficult” personality was deemed a liability, but her legitimate anger and sharp candor might have been career assets in 2018.
Manning's more noted works include the The Play Room (published as The Camperlea Girls in the US), The Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes), which were based on her experiences in Athens and Bucharest during World War II, and The Levant Trilogy (The Danger Tree, The Battle Won and Lost, and The Sum of Things). She also wrote poetry and non-fiction, including Remarkable Expedition: The Story of Stanley's Rescue of Emin Pasha from Equatorial Africa.
Excellent, I've been feminizing my canon since January and I'm always looking for more suggestions to add to my reading list! So far Sylvia Townsend Warner has been my best discovery.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:36 PM on June 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:36 PM on June 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
gusottertrout, I was afraid of the same thing, but I was able to add it to my Feedly RSS feed just by searching the key words. (I was afraid it might be too new for them to have set up a feed just for that column, but it's all good.)
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:09 PM on June 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:09 PM on June 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
Wow what a great find, I love that the Paris Review is doing this! The Balkan Trilogy sounds fascinating, I will have to check it out. Also Lapham's Quarterly is one of my favorite magazines. Emma Garman's piece for them, In the Clouds is a really good read as well.
posted by drinkyclown at 10:52 PM on June 16, 2018
posted by drinkyclown at 10:52 PM on June 16, 2018
Manning may unfairly receive relatively little attention, but saying feminists
posted by pracowity at 3:30 AM on June 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
"make such an exhibition of themselves. None can be said to be beauties. Most have faces like porridge."can't have made her any friends, porridge-faced or otherwise, in the women's studies department.
posted by pracowity at 3:30 AM on June 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
Some years ago, the Pompidou in Paris did something similar for its main 20th-century-avant-garde exhibition. Using their powerful acquisition resources, they replaced it with an exhibition showing the history of modern art using only the works of world-class female artists (with possibly a few iconic exceptions; I think they left Duchamp's urinal on show). Anyway, the exhibition was called “Elles”, and was eye-opening.
posted by acb at 4:46 AM on June 17, 2018
posted by acb at 4:46 AM on June 17, 2018
> I can't recommend The Balkan Trilogy enough.
Same here, and The Levant Trilogy is just as good. (And I highly recommend Fortunes of War, the TV series based on them; it stars Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, both absurdly young and spectacularly good, and kept me up many a night when it first aired in 1987.)
> Manning may unfairly receive relatively little attention, but
...she wasn't as woke as we all are today. Can we please not do this? Thanks!
posted by languagehat at 6:41 AM on June 17, 2018
Same here, and The Levant Trilogy is just as good. (And I highly recommend Fortunes of War, the TV series based on them; it stars Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, both absurdly young and spectacularly good, and kept me up many a night when it first aired in 1987.)
> Manning may unfairly receive relatively little attention, but
...she wasn't as woke as we all are today. Can we please not do this? Thanks!
posted by languagehat at 6:41 AM on June 17, 2018
> "... using only the works of world-class female artists (with possibly a few iconic exceptions; I think they left Duchamp's urinal on show)"
You mean Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's urinal?
posted by kyrademon at 7:13 AM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
You mean Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's urinal?
posted by kyrademon at 7:13 AM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
...she wasn't as woke as we all are today.Given the past-tense of pracowity's comment, I read it as referring to contemporaneous feminists, not people of "today". It seems a relevant observation. One does not need to pedestalize a female artist to recognize that her works have been overlooked by history.
posted by inconstant at 7:48 AM on June 17, 2018
Thanks, kyrademon, that was fascinating/instructive/infuriating.
posted by the sobsister at 8:27 AM on June 17, 2018
posted by the sobsister at 8:27 AM on June 17, 2018
Caution: do not begin Manning's Balkan Trilogy unless you can commit to reading six novels non-stop, because, once you begin you will not stop until you have read them all. I am thrilled to see this brilliant writer getting attention.
posted by charlesminus at 10:07 AM on June 17, 2018
posted by charlesminus at 10:07 AM on June 17, 2018
> Given the past-tense of pracowity's comment, I read it as referring to contemporaneous feminists, not people of "today". It seems a relevant observation. One does not need to pedestalize a female artist to recognize that her works have been overlooked by history.
But one is also not forced to de-pedestalize a female artist (who, frankly, was never pedestalized to begin with) just because one happens to know something about her that looks bad from our perspective. I'm really, really sick of MeFi's inability to tolerate any sort of discussion of anyone from the past without making a big thing of how they were racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever. Of course they were; pretty much everyone was (and mostly still is, for that matter). Exactly how is it a relevant observation? Whose experience is being enhanced by it? It's just another example of the dead-goat thing.
posted by languagehat at 11:55 AM on June 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
But one is also not forced to de-pedestalize a female artist (who, frankly, was never pedestalized to begin with) just because one happens to know something about her that looks bad from our perspective. I'm really, really sick of MeFi's inability to tolerate any sort of discussion of anyone from the past without making a big thing of how they were racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever. Of course they were; pretty much everyone was (and mostly still is, for that matter). Exactly how is it a relevant observation? Whose experience is being enhanced by it? It's just another example of the dead-goat thing.
posted by languagehat at 11:55 AM on June 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
I stopped reading books by men four or five years ago; a new years resolution that kept getting renewed because it feels so so good.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Kah Walla, a Cameroonian activist who ran for president of Camaroon in 2011 (and is widely regarded as the first woman to do so). During Q&A, someone asked her what inspired her to enter the presidential race. She said that a few years before she ran, she had noticed that the authors she read were almost entirely white men. She made the decision to not read any books written by that demographic, and kept it up for 10 years.
According to Walla, during that time she was exposed to histories and perspectives that totally reshaped how she considered society, power and organizing. It was a transformative period of her life, filled with marginalized voices on topics across the spectrum, fiction and non-fiction alike.
I feel like I've heard enough from the male perspective for a few lifetimes now and am never going to be able to come close to cutting it out of my life entirely (not least because I am a cis het white man myself). Right now I don't ever see myself going back to reading books by men, but we'll see how I feel in 10 years. Maybe at some point I'll only block white male authors from my list, like Kah Walla described.
Anyway I'm psyched to check out the Balkan Trilogy and will continue to monitor this column!
posted by soy bean at 2:38 PM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Kah Walla, a Cameroonian activist who ran for president of Camaroon in 2011 (and is widely regarded as the first woman to do so). During Q&A, someone asked her what inspired her to enter the presidential race. She said that a few years before she ran, she had noticed that the authors she read were almost entirely white men. She made the decision to not read any books written by that demographic, and kept it up for 10 years.
According to Walla, during that time she was exposed to histories and perspectives that totally reshaped how she considered society, power and organizing. It was a transformative period of her life, filled with marginalized voices on topics across the spectrum, fiction and non-fiction alike.
I feel like I've heard enough from the male perspective for a few lifetimes now and am never going to be able to come close to cutting it out of my life entirely (not least because I am a cis het white man myself). Right now I don't ever see myself going back to reading books by men, but we'll see how I feel in 10 years. Maybe at some point I'll only block white male authors from my list, like Kah Walla described.
Anyway I'm psyched to check out the Balkan Trilogy and will continue to monitor this column!
posted by soy bean at 2:38 PM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Exactly how is it a relevant observation? Whose experience is being enhanced by it?
Sorry languagehat, I know you're trying to push back on the dead goating thing, and I'm not defending the execution of the comment (which probably seems like less of a problem to me than it had to you since I came to this thread late and the thread's stayed on track with recommendations rather than following that comment), but I do want to speak up for whether 'problematic' things should be called out at all. In a thread about recommending someone's writing I think it's helpful to know that I might there come across a sentiment that I want to avoid if I'm looking for pleasure reading material, especially a sentiment given weight by its still current popularity, especially amongst very active corners of the toxic internet that spills regularly into my regular internet (not to mention IRL). Even if it's just something eye-roll worthy like the example mentioned, it can still be uncomfortable to read because it calls up ghosts of the mass of people who have toxically and actively championed it, or experiences that I'd rather not think be thinking about at that moment. Knowing that these are some of things she might express lets me go into her works expecting it, rather than be surprised by it, and that's valuable to me and my self care. There are plenty of people whose writings have aged well and we don't find problematic today, and I don't think people from the past should be called out any less than people today if what they're saying still affects or could affect people today. The way it was framed was probably not the most conducive to a neutral conversation but given the way the thread went in the end I came away with a more nuanced view of the subject profiled, and glad for a heads up.
Anyway thanks for the Fortunes of War rec, it's cold here and I was just then looking for something to curl up in a blanket with. The Balkan trilogy is going on my reading list too.
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 7:49 PM on June 17, 2018 [6 favorites]
Sorry languagehat, I know you're trying to push back on the dead goating thing, and I'm not defending the execution of the comment (which probably seems like less of a problem to me than it had to you since I came to this thread late and the thread's stayed on track with recommendations rather than following that comment), but I do want to speak up for whether 'problematic' things should be called out at all. In a thread about recommending someone's writing I think it's helpful to know that I might there come across a sentiment that I want to avoid if I'm looking for pleasure reading material, especially a sentiment given weight by its still current popularity, especially amongst very active corners of the toxic internet that spills regularly into my regular internet (not to mention IRL). Even if it's just something eye-roll worthy like the example mentioned, it can still be uncomfortable to read because it calls up ghosts of the mass of people who have toxically and actively championed it, or experiences that I'd rather not think be thinking about at that moment. Knowing that these are some of things she might express lets me go into her works expecting it, rather than be surprised by it, and that's valuable to me and my self care. There are plenty of people whose writings have aged well and we don't find problematic today, and I don't think people from the past should be called out any less than people today if what they're saying still affects or could affect people today. The way it was framed was probably not the most conducive to a neutral conversation but given the way the thread went in the end I came away with a more nuanced view of the subject profiled, and glad for a heads up.
Anyway thanks for the Fortunes of War rec, it's cold here and I was just then looking for something to curl up in a blanket with. The Balkan trilogy is going on my reading list too.
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 7:49 PM on June 17, 2018 [6 favorites]
This is great. I was really in to the "classical" music version of this that ran on a radio show out of Princeton. Here's a rundown of the women composers played: Classical Discoveries: In Praise of Woman.
posted by WeekendJen at 12:38 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by WeekendJen at 12:38 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
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posted by gusottertrout at 8:38 PM on June 16, 2018