Too Little Honour
Jane Eyre by Fay Weldon
Lyric Theatre, 1997
‘It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.’
Jane Eyre, Chapter 12
Charlotte Brontë
The music used in this production of Jane Eyre was written by Clara Josephine Wieck (1819–1896). Born in Leipzig, she received early lessons from her father, a noted piano teacher, and quickly became one of the most brilliant concert pianists of her day. She gave her first concert at the age of eleven, and the following year published four of her Polonaises. Later she and her husband toured Europe and Russia and after he died in 1856, she continued her career, promoting both his work and that of her lifelong friend Johannes Brahms. In her final years she taught at the Frankfurt Conservatory, and her works, mainly for piano, include two concertos as well as songs and cadenzas for concertos by Beethoven and Mozart. But these days she is better known as Mors Robert Schumann.
Why is it that a woman so obviously abounding in talent herself should now principally be remembered as the wife of a great Romantic composer? If the reason is simply that Robert Schumann happened to write more, this was probably as much due to his wife’s encouragement as it was to any stronger creative impulse of his own, and it was certainly true that whenever Robert was composing, Clara was unable to practise; and if Clara appears now to have been merely a shadowy figure in the background despite her independent fame and ability, this could be because Schumann exemplifies more colourfully our cherished idea of the true Romantic – he was prolific in mad bursts, probably suffered from manic depression, and died in an asylum.
The artistic life of the 19th century would not be half so rich had it not been for the women – mostly unsung – who contributed either directly or more subtly to it. The prejudice of the time refused to accept that women could be as creatively significant as men anyway, which was why so many female artists in al disciplines had to disguise their sex. The Brontë sisters were not the only ones to offer their works under cover of male pseudonyms: Mary Ann Evans published only one book under her own name, a translation from the German of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, yet writing as George Eliot she was also responsible for Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, while in France Aurore Dudevant produced over a hundred novels and plays, many of which were either so erotic or outspokenly socialist for their time that even Bohemian Paris could not have enjoyed them so much had it not been for the reassuringly masculine nom de plume under which they appeared. (The novelist rather cheekily derived that name, George Sand, from the first of her many lovers, Jules Sandeau.)
Yet as a writer George Sand’s gifts tend to be overshadowed by the far more titillating fact that she also happened to enjoy an unconventional lifestyle. Not only was she one of the most prominent public women to adopt male attire, she smoked in public, and was at various times the mistress of such literary figures as Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and the composer Chopin. But simply because she was a woman, it is this aspect of her personal comportment which piques our curiosity first. Men were expected to have affairs, so they did When Clara’s father objected to his daughter’s relationship with Schumann, she dutifully broke it off and Robert consoled himself in the arms of the British pianist Anna Robena Laidlaw…
Even when the bond between male and female is not one of marriage, again and again it is the woman who comes off worse. William Wordsworth’s “Exquisite sister” Dorothy was companion and muse to both him and Coleridge, and inspired a good deal of their finest nature writing, yet she herself produced a Journal which contains some of the most brilliant descriptions of nature in the language. Although both men acknowledged their debt to her, it’s possible that neither would have become as famous as they did had it not been for her laying the foundations. The reader only has to compare Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils with Dorothy’s description of a similar scene to realise that in order to produce the first, Wordsworth needed to do little more than insert rhyme into the prose of the second. We can only speculate how much greater a force in English letters Dorothy might have become had not pre-senile dementia robbed her of the last twenty-two years of her life.
But then so many of the women artists of the 19th century lived frail lives – the Brontës in this sense were typical rather than unusual – and the reasons are not hard to find. Denied the educational stimulus and full social life men could take for granted, at home they were expected to work like skivvies for fathers and brothers while once married their role more often than not was simply to provide uncomplaining support to husbands and offspring. (The fact that the Schumanns’ eight children never stood in the way of her arduous career says a lot for Clara’s youthful strength of mind and physical resilience.)
So while the balance may one day be rectified in favour of the neglected women writers, artists and musicians of the last century, for now perhaps the best we can do to honour their memory is adapt the old cliché: “Behind every successful man there is a (potentially just as successful and influential) woman, probably, like Ginger Rogers, doing the same as him only backwards and in heels.” It might not tell the full story, but at least it’s a start.
PS
I felt a bit of a fraud writing this. Sometimes you just had to bite the bullet and bash through the work, however under- or positively unqualified you were. So my indignation had to be whipped up for the occasion. Plus in the mid-90s we had no internet so all research had to be done in the library from books, and given that this piece had to be written in a hurry, I ended up including only the most obvious examples that came to mind. Just the other day, for instance, I watched a film about the French writer Colette, whose husband took all the credit for writing the Claudine series of stories, locking her in her room until she had written sufficient pages each day. (The fact that no one suspected at the time ‒ how would some middle-aged bloke with a moustache seem to know so much about the life of a French schoolgirl? ‒ does seem to stretch credulity, but then again maybe that’s simply another sign of how biased and blinkered society has always been with regards to capable women in any sphere.) I’m sure there must have been many other women, just as hard working, just as frustrated, whose full contributions either still await discovery or are doomed to die unappreciated for ever – a melancholy thought.
I probably overdid my one gimmick, delaying the reveal of the subject’s name (Mrs Robert Schumann, George Sand) until the last line of the paragraph, but I should imagine anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge would have guessed right from the clues in the opening lines. And while I tried my best to grant these brave pioneers their due, the thought now occurs that perhaps there might have been more back and forth within a couple than we perhaps now imagine; husbands and wives do talk to each other, after all, and sharing a house and a bed, they probably did so back then as well. These days the energetic wife will frequently act as secretary or amanuensis for the toiling male scribe, and will surely offer the occasional plot twist or character development. Might the same not have prevailed back then? Did Robert never overhear his wife battling with an intransigent coda and offer the helpful hint, “Why not try transposing it into the remote key of G#, m’dear, just for a few measures? See if that shakes anything loose?” Might Chopin not have interrupted his composition of his Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat major, Op. 18 to cast a Polish eye over his lover George’s pages and murmur, “This memoir of our winter sojourn in Majorca, my love, are you absolutely positive it was a goat that fell through our bedroom roof and not a chicken?”
It’s certainly true that a partner can be invaluable for those moments when your own inspiration flags. While writing our panto Swords and Sorcery, my friend and co-author Liz Vickery and I spent a long evening trying to come up with a list of silly names for the court jester to announce, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue-style, as a way to open Act Two. Between us we’d managed to crank out no more than about a dozen, including:
Sir Spender, knight of the garter, and his wife, Pretty Polly.
The Duke of Wellington and his old boot, Mrs Wellington.
Sir Patrick Moore and his dog, Star.
Lord Beeching and his Train.
Lord Lucan. Lord Lucan? Absent…
All fairly ho-hum, I’m sure you’ll agree, and those references to Lords Beeching and Lucan show how far back we were having to cast the net to get anything at all. The thing was set in the middle ages so I was tussling with a name I’d heard from that time: Ranulf (he was the Sheriff of Nottingham’s man as portrayed by Kenneth Haigh in the 1976 film Robin and Marian), and I was musing uselessly to myself, “Sir Ranulf, Sir Ranulf,” when Liz suddenly came out with “Sir Ranulf into the night.”
I almost kissed her. But then, wouldn’t that have been just another show of patronising male condescension? To say nothing of social etiquette, between friends, the breaching of? Even assuming she would have welcomed the advance in the first place. And let’s not even get into the potential folly of shifting a hitherto warm and platonic relationship into different and potentially dangerous uncharted territory. I must continue to believe I did the sensible and sensitive thing by holding off. And on the off chance I was wrong and this was a missed opportunity, I console myself with the certain knowledge that I was the one who missed out most.
Maybe things haven’t moved on so much from the 19th century after all.