When she speaks, it is as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a mistress, as a person who has, in all her guises, suffered. If an early lover, whom she decided not to marry because she feared he wanted only to make her happy, once described her as a "giggling armful," that was in a pre-Larkin arcadia when there were still virgins. In those pill-less days, a girl could peel off her sweater and, in pity and contempt, reach back, unhook, and show a man what he had never seen before. After which, he was—all too often disastrously—hers for life. She was also his; that was the disaster.
She was a precocious student poetess then and, though she abandoned the lyric (there could only be one Plath in a generation, and it was Sylvia), she retains an inner conviction that she is still an artist, as well as a woman, a mother, a wife, a mistress, a person who has, in all her guises, suffered. With clambering application, she has made career and passion coincide: yet, believe her, she is more ruthless with herself than ever she was with anyone else. From her earliest menstrual years, the common pursuit spurred her into uncommon seriousness.
The duty of being a Woman demands that she feels more intensely than the average female, for whom—believe her—she has an insatiable, almost aggressive, pity. She has never taken another woman's man without wishing that she could—emotionally—be with her as well as with him. As she has said more than once, she has—as a woman, a wife, a mother, a mistress—in all her guises, suffered.
She would like nothing better than to see women vindicated; every time she is co-opted—grief!—to a new cultural committee, to chair a book prize, even when she sits at dinner next to someone who has always wanted to meet her, and has a question which she—better than anyone he can think of—can answer, she feels nothing but humble, and unambiguously—in this, at least—militant; she responds to him not as her singular self, but rather as our—women's—selves. Then, ten to one, the fool asks for her phone number.
She laughed when the world was younger. Today's frequently public face is harrowed by private yesterdays. It is, however, in the light of lived anguish that she craves a new society, in which the positive ambition so natural, possibly so specific, to women—to cherish and to create—can embellish a social structure that does not banalise female beauty or subvert female energies.
As she ages (one does, one does), she finds that she does not any more tolerantly endure the cynicism of the media persons with whom—God help us, on what other ground is one to fight?—she has been obliged to spend so much of her life, alas, to the detriment of the children who matter to her more than anything. Alas, it is not only wise wounds that bleed or must be incurred. What is a woman who is only a mother? A figure of venerated derision, of absurd probity, a female without being a full woman. De Beauvoir was so right, and so wrong. Like Pascal; Weil; Greer?
In the end, as she has argued in ardent print, the Pure Mother is in degrading flight from (and often towards) the many other forms of degradation which a woman must undergo, if she is to be filled with the vivid fuel that can be supplied by knowledge alone. For a woman, experience is a form of knowledge, yes, but knowledge is also a form of experience. Thus, even under a common domestic lamp, a woman must needs always read by another light from a male. Her critical stance, her readings, are radically different from even the most sympathetic mate. Why deny that one thinks differently in a little black dress, even when it is about to be released in a soft heap at one's feet?
Yes (ah Molly's yes, how true, how damnably enduring!), she loves men even as she sides with women. She has loved quite a famous few and, as you may have seen in aching interviews (oh the pauses, the pauses!) suffered, yes, with all of them. She has made a fool of herself for men and, as she now reflects, for herself as well: there is, she states, no such thing as dignity within true love, but what dignity can there be without it? No, no, she means something important when she says that a deeply felt life is, in post-Thatcherite society, literally impossible. She feels this deeply.
It is to see the present better that—as biographer, historian and woman—she has chosen to emigrate to the past. Why else does she extend her hand, her pen, her talent (such as it is) to great, forgotten women, whose lives she reprieves and re-breathes? The fallible talent of the moral archaelogist lies in saying to oneself "let us dig there!"
She is not ashamed to advertise the self-effacement which demands that her subject's character (always a female cropped of greatness by the surly scission of a man's world) take precedence over authorial vanities, and passions. No, no, she does not think that a woman's capacity for love grows feebler with the waning of her moons. She rather finds that it expands in a culminating surge of ambition for a men-and-women's world in which she and the woman with whose husband she now lives will become best of friends.
Only yesterday, she told a young female researching—oh dear!—her life, that despite all she has had the cruel privilege of living through—as a woman, as a wife, as a mother, as a mistress, as a person who has, in all her guises, suffered—she still finds that she can "hope for the best, whichever sex it turns out to be."
