Other Stories

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Today on Books I Have Loved, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

I first read this book when I was 16, and at high school. I was studying it for my CSYS English dissertation on alternative worlds. I loved it from the word go, and have read it countless times since.

The novel is set in a time chronologically contemporaneous with now (or with 1985, when it was published, but it could equally be 2008) but in an alternative world where America has been overthrown by a theocracy and it now The Republic of Gilead, and lives are now to be lived according to strict rules. People are divided and alloted social status on the basis of gender, colour, caste, and fertility. Men are the important ones - all men are now in the military with the top rank being Commander of the Faith. They are given Wives who have to dress in blue, like the Virgin Mary. If they have Daughters, the Daughters must dress in white until marriage. These men, too, are given a Handmaid, who dress in red with a white head-dress that obscures their periphiral vision: they can only see directly ahead, or down. Handmaids tend to be women who have broken "gender laws". They have complained, they have protested, but they have to be fertile. They are there to bear more children for the Husband. They have no identity of their own, they take the names of their masters. Our narrator, our Handmaid, is Offred. Of-Fred.

For those women who break more serious gender laws, are lesbians, are sterile, are widows, or were nuns are officially Unwomen. They are not useful to the regime - they can't bear children. They are sent out into the Colonies - the wilderness - to die a slow death from radiation sickness. Homosexual men - gender traitors - are also sent out there to die with them. All of them, men and women, have to wear grey dresses.

There are Jezebels. They are confined to secret clubs for the pleasure of the Husbands and their guests - they dress in provocative outfits from the Time Before. Cheerleaders outfits, school uniforms, and so on. They have make up. There is The Wall, where dissidents uncovered by the Eyes (the secret police force) are hung as a deterrent to other possible rule-breakers.

Offred had a husband and a young daughter before the regime change happened. The three of them tried to flee to Canada but they were caught. Our narrator - whose real name we never learn, though it's suggested it might be June - is sent to be a Handmaid, their daughter is adopted by a Commander of the Faith and his Wife, and we never learn the fate of her husband, Luke. She watches everyday to see if he is hung on the Wall, but he isn't there.

Offred isn't getting pregnant and if she doesn't soon then there is a fear that she will be deemed sterile and an Unwoman. Men, you see, cannot be sterile. Only women. She is advised to secretly take another lover, Nick, to increase her chances of conceiving. But... is Nick an Eye? What about Ofglen, her neighbour Handmaid, with whom she has been illegally communicating?

It is too easy to say that this is a feminist novel, though it is. Not only does it make stark warnings about the position of women in society, but it also attacks religion, and the way that women are represented in the Bible and other religious texts, which is the reason that it is one of the Top 100 most complained about books in terms of studying it in school in America. The religious folk don't appear to like being poked. :) It is one of my most favouritest books in the whole world though, and opened the floodgates of my Atwood-Love. In The Handmaid's Tale she manages to show the full gamult of womanhood by showing everything women were and could be before the theocracy intervened. It showed the potential of power of women, and how they needed to be repressed for the ultra-religious society to work. Women, for the rulers, were always the spanner in the works. It's a call to metaphorical arms to women to reach their potential, and to make their own lives on their own terms. Much joyous fist-waving ensues from me.

I don't care if Margaret Atwood signs books with a fancy machine, I think she's amazing.

Victorian Feminist Addendum

Just as a brief follow up to all the debate about calling Victorians "feminists", I've just checked the OED, and the first recorded written use of the word is from 1894. "Feminism" turns up in 1895.

So presumably it was bubbling around earlier than that, if only spoken.

Feminism: Officially Victorian.

Facts and Links

Fictional reading is still taking somewhat of a battering, and at times like this, poetry is a god-send. Recently I have been reveling in Emily Bronte's poetry, especially "No coward soul is mine", which in itself is very high up in my list of favourite lines from poetry.

I'm still ploughing on with The Victorians by AN Wilson, which is proving to be one of the very best history books I have ever read. The scope is incredibly far-reaching without the reader feeling short-changed on any particular topic: it really is an incredibly well-written book - and much funnier in places than you might expect. If you've any interest in the Victorian period, then I implore you to look past its bulk and settle in.

Did you know that during the Irish famine, many adults starved because potatoes were the only crop they were able to grow, and even then they could only grow enough for personal use? Many people ate literally nothing but potatoes - up to 13 or so POUNDS per day - so no potatoes = no food. Meanwhile, the UK government were still having Irish corn exported. Tragic stuff.

My other fact of the day - and this is nothing to do with Victorianism - is that today in the UK there are more members of the National Trust than of any political party. How awfully British.

In other news, here are some links I have loved recently:

• Literary tattoos!
• Bookmooch rocks. Free book swaps mean new books without the environmental impact of making more paper. Have picked up some excellent Virago Modern Classics in original green livery.
• Really interesting F Word discussion on having children late in life.
• This is a BRILLIANT piece from The Observer about Fern Britton and her gastric band.
• Freelance Mum is one of my new favourite blogs.
• Lorrie Moore: A Life in Books.

Right, I'm off back to the 19th century.

Really, really easy feminist activism

The F Word posted a short piece on some really easy feminist activism that anyone with a pen, some stickers and a conscience can do:

"Reaching for the as ever non-existent toilet roll in a club last night, I noticed a sticker on the dispenser which simply read “Sheffield Rape Crisis” followed by the helpline number. Someone had written “Thanks, this really helped me” on it, and another woman had added “ditto”. It’s a great idea - so get printing and sticking! You can buy labels from Staples, and Publisher has a template for all the standard label sizes so it’s really easy to do. Rape Crisis phone numbers can be found here."

Get to it people! Original post here.

What is Victorian Feminism?

I had an interesting blog comment today, which I answered and realised that the answer was about as long as a post in itself, so I decided to repost both questions and answer here as an independent post. If anyone has any comments or theories, please, weigh in!

COMMENT FROM WAMBALUS:

The Madwoman in the Attic is the book de riguer of victorian women's studies and makes for very interesting reading as well.

As a side note, how do you compromise applying a modern term such as feminism to a historical period? For example, studies of homosexuality in the Renaissance - as the term itself did not come into existance until Oscar Wilde's indecency trials in 1895, how could identity homosexuality prior to this period? In the same vein, what do you determine 'feminism' to be in the Victorian age, and do you think it is fair to say that certain writers are exhibiting feminism in their works, when they had no intention of doing so?

MY ANSWER:

Interesting comment, thanks. (Also, I see you are posting from Glasgow Uni, where I got my undergraduate degree, so an extra hello).

Feminism as a term originated in the Victorian period, so the question about applying it to the period, I think, is sort of moot. For the first time since Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, women were publishing works with the express intent of advocating women's rights (eg Marion Reid in 1843, publishing 'A Plea for Women' in Edinburgh) and debates about women's rights (particularly married women's rights) were happening in parliament on a yearly basis.

I think that, possibly, there were some women who did not necessarily consider themselves feminist who said things that would be considered feminist today, but there has been a great deal of academic research into the literary and historical frameworks of the period, and while I'm not on top of all the research (I am but a lowly MA student) the term "feminism" can be applied different ways. For example, Florence Nightingale very much distanced herself from the feminist movement a la Barbara Leigh Smith, but wouldn't we argue from our place in the 21st century that she embodied many of the qualities we call "feminist" today. Things don't stubbornly resist come into being just because there is no word for it, whether it be feminism, homosexuality, socialism, fascism, even language existed before we had a name for it. Language came first; the way to write it down came long long after. I believe the same of feminism.

Feminism for the Victorians was demanding equal voting rights for women as for men; it was demanding that married women did not automatically lose all rights to their property, their earnings, and their children (Charlotte Bronte was shocked to discover after her marriage that the copyright to her writings plus all her earnings automatically became her husband's); it was campaigning against restrictive laws that prohibited women from graduating from universities, from gaining degrees and training to be doctors etc. Feminism in the Victorian age was being more than someone's wife, daughter, sister. It was being a person in their own right.

It will always a term that people define in different ways, there is no getting away from that (hello semantics), but I think it is incredibly interesting to examine the literature that emerged from the movement of the self-confessed feminists. That is what I aim to do in my dissertation - the exact angle is still bubbling in my head somewhere - but feminism was a hugely important part of Victorian social, political, and literary culture. It wasn't under the radar, and it invoked responses from Queen Victoria herself.

So there you go. There isn't any right or wrong answer I suspect, but if anyone wants to add anything/disagree/agree/ask more, please go ahead in the comment box below.

And thanks to wambalus for starting an interesting discussion.

Feminist Feasting

Typepad seems to have undergone a transformation, so forgive me if this post takes on a random variety of incarnations before it looks like usual. There are all sorts of weird buttons here in the "compose" page, and it may take me a while to get used to it.

Of course I may get it right first time and you lot will never know the difference, in which case, ignore me.

I am not at work. I am at home. I am sitting on my bed with my laptop on my knee with an open notepad and a pile of table-thumping feminist books beside me. It's a beautiful thing. Having reached the end of my first year of the MA, I am being a disgusting swot and doing some reading around what I want to do for my dissertation next year, ie, Victorian feminist literature. My self-prescribed reading list between now and October includes:

• Cassandra by Florence Nightingale
• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar
• The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays
• The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle by Sally Ledger (who teaches on my MA, I am such a goodie-goodie)
• The Feminist History Reader edited by Sue Morgan
• A Widening Sphere edited by Martha Vicinus
• Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age also edited by Martha Vicinus
• Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Victorian Writing by Women on Women edited by Susan Hamilton
• A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson

Never mind some re-reading of various novels and short stories by Victorian women. There's no doubt I've set myself quite a task, and I fear that as a result there will be fewer contemporary fiction reviews within these blog pages, but this is nothing if not an honest account of what I read. I'm sure I'll manage to slip a few contemporary treats in along the way. :)

Nearly finished The Story of a Marriage - only about 60 pages to go. Had a busy day yesterday and so didn't get the chance to read quite as much as I hoped. Today, hopefully more. Am going into London soon and hopefully the journey each way will give me ample time to polish it off.

I *heart* Kira Cochrane

I think I love Kira Cochrane. I don't even know what she looks like, but I have never read a word of hers with which I have disagreed.

Today she has a big article in The Guardian about late-term abortion, and why the limit MUST stay at 24 weeks:

Many of those who have late-term abortions are the most vulnerable: teenagers who didn't realise that they were pregnant until five months' gestation; women with learning disabilities; those using methadone in drug rehabilitation programmes, which puts a halt to your periods. Women like the one I read of recently, whose partner started beating her up when she became pregnant, and who feared she would never be able to escape him if she had his baby. (In more than 30% of domestic violence cases, the abuse started during pregnancy.) Women who have suffered a severely traumatic episode - the death of a partner, or a child, for instance - who fear that the stress might affect foetal development. The BPAS has just published a 28-day audit of late-term abortion requests, to be distributed to MPs. The stories include that of a woman with two small daughters from a previous marriage, who had an unplanned pregnancy with her current partner, which he urged her to continue. She then found out that he was abusing her daughters. As Ann Furedi of BPAS says, the stories "provide a really stark contrast to the abstract, philosophical and rather sterile discussion about viability and not viability. What this does is to take it woman by woman. The challenge that we're putting to MPs is to look at this and think about it - what makes you think that the lives of these women would have been better if they'd had to continue their pregnancy? We're talking about women who, by their own admission, are saying, 'I cannot cope with having this child'."

Petition Asking for Funding for 24 Hour Rape/Sexual Abuse Helpline

This was brought to my attention this morning by The F Word. There has been a petition started asking the government for funding for a 24-hour helpline for victims of rape and sexual assault - it staggers me that we don't already have one in this country when rape convictions at sitting at a ridiculous 5%.

The full text of the petition reads:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Provide the funding to set up a National 24 Hour Helpline for Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault.

Far too many people in the UK do not have access to a Rape Crisis centre or a Sexual Assault Referral Centre. The facilities that do exist for victims of rape and sexual assault are seriously stretched, as they struggle with not enough funding and not enough staff.

In those areas where victims do have access to a Rape Crisis Centre or SARC, people often have difficulty getting through on the telephone, and once through, cannot always talk for as long as is needed due to other pressures on the over-worked staff.

It is time that the funding and expertise were put in place to set up a National 24 Hour Helpline for victims of rape and sexual assault. It is very much needed, in this country where rape and sexual assault are prevalent, yet the conviction rate for these crimes is at an all time low.

The government must take this issue seriously, and setting up a national 24 hour helpline would be a vital step in helping the thousands of victims who have no access to a Rape Crisis Centre or SARC."

You can sign the petition here.

If we make it to 200 then the Prime Minister HAS to respond.

Please, please, please take a moment to do this. I know this is a statistic that I mention all the time, but it is true: the number one cause of death or serious injury for women across the world is domestic and sexual violence.

The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West

I don't know if you saw it, but on Saturday there was an excellent piece in the Guardian by Carmen Callil, who started Virago back in the 70s. It explained the motivation behind setting up this publishing company that championed women ('How often I remember sitting at dinner tables in the 1960s, the men talking to each other about serious matters, the women sitting quietly like decorated lumps of sugar. I remember one such occasion when I raised my fist, banged the table and shouted: "I have views on Bangladesh too!"'), and it was a wonderful article that made me feel really quite inspired.

And so today, I return to my First Ever Virago Modern Classic, The Return of the Soldier by  Rebecca West. For such a short book, it really does pack quite a punch, and I find myself thinking of it surprisingly often. It sort of slots into my head with Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf because two of the main themes are more or less the same: the passage of time (public and private), and The Great War.

Chris Ellis returns from fighting in the war a shell-shocked man. Via hospital, he eventually returns to the marital home (or mansion, rather) and his beautiful wife Kitty. However, the shell-shock has destroyed his memory, and because of that we discover that Kitty wasn't his first love. Five years previously he had been in love with - and planned to marry - the considerably more humble Margaret Allingham. He had had a huge argument with her, which was what put paid to their marriage plans. In his amnesia, though, he believes himself to be still in love with Margaret, and has no idea who Kitty is. Narrated by Kitty's sister Jenny - who lives with them - we watch as Kitty allows Chris to meet with Margaret, but only deep in the grounds of the marital estate - never in the house.

Kitty's disgust with the situation is not just about jealousy. Kitty is a wealthy, beautiful woman, who thinks constantly about social position, while Margaret is of a more meagre income and ordinary looking. Thus, the house becomes representative of the public: public (i.e. linear) time, the show we put on for the neighbours, social position, outward gestures, while the garden becomes a forest of the past, of the private time scale in Chris's head, of the breakdown of Edwardian social structure that the war caused. As the novel moves forward (and West is different to Woolf in that she tells the story simply in a straightforward fashion) and Chris begins to regain his memory, we watch the struggle between very different feelings for two very different women, and therefore two very different lives.

I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't read the book, but I do beg and implore you to go and read it. It's only short (less than 200 pages), and its simplicity of language makes the story incredibly moving.   

Charity Shop Haul and Mini Link Love

I have been trying really hard not to buy anymore books. For one, I bought the iPhone of Joy recently, and therefore should really not be spending anymore money, and for two, I've so behind in my reading at the moment that it's quite painful. Uni work + extremely busy time at work + family stress = not a lot of Kirsty Reading Time.

However, all of these things are done and dusted for the time being, and the weekend just gone saw me creeping back to form with a book and a half devoured over two days. *sigh* That's better. Thus I feel utterly justified in having had a bit of a second-hand splurge on Saturday morning. Boyfriend and I had taken a leisurely breakfast at a local cafe and were wandering home when through the window of the Mind shop I spied some shelves of books. That was it, I was through the door with Boyfriend trailing after me. "I just want to look," I lied, as I suspiciously fingered my purse in my pocket.

Ten minutes later, I emerged into the fresh air £26 poorer but 17 books richer. What a haul! I picked up:

• Four Dreamers and Emily - Stevie Davies (I've never read anything by her, but she's   been highly recommended to me several times over the years, and it was a Women's Press book. And it was 80p.)
• Alberta and Jacob - Cora Sandel (Another Women's Press edition, and translated from Norwegian, so falls into both my "women's fiction" and "translated fiction" quotas.)
• The Remarkable Journey of Miss Tranby Quirke - Elizabeth Ridley (It's VMC. It was 80p. Of course I was going to buy it.)
• Sexual Politics - Kate Millett (Feminist table-thumping ensues.)
• The Brontes Went to Woolworths - Rachel Ferguson (Talked about over at Justine Picardie's blog, and found in delicious old green VMC livery.)
• Zoology - Ben Dolnick (Recently released in B format paperback, it caught my attention in Borders some weeks ago. Finding it in A format paperback for just over a quid was obviously fate.)
• I, Claudius / Claudius the God - Robert Graves (An omnibus edition from 1976, complete with TV tie-ie photo on the front.)

And then, the piece de resistance. For 20 of your British Pounds, a Virago Modern Classics box set, in perfect condition, box still shiny and new, nary a spine broken featuring the following:

• Precious Bane - Mary Webb
• Liza's England - Pat Barker
• The Land of Spices - Kate O'Brien
• The Edwardians - Vita Sackville-West
• Fireworks - Angela Carter
• Good Behaviour - Molly Keane
• Provincial Daugher - R M Dashwood
• Our Spoons Came From Woolworths - Barbara Comyns
• Now in November - Josephine Johnson

I was massively excited. I can't even begin to tell you. Another entirely-free weekend awaits me, so I can't wait to get properly stuck in.

And now, some mini-link love. Knitter Friend has just started her own Etsy Shop, and her creations are quite beautiful. Go see (and buy). Also, her blog can be found here.

Also, all this week on OUPblog, I am posting questions concerning Oxford World's Classics. No prizes, just for fun. But do go and have a shot. Answers on Friday.

The Women of the World...

Only the briefest of posts as I am in a whirl of essay and houseguests. However, here's something to get you thinking in the meantime:

Thanks to Lauren AKA Academic Friend for giving me this postcard.

Other Oxford Lit Fest Events

I also managed to make it to a couple events as a regular punter this year.

Last night a friend and I went to see Sally Brampton and Lisa Appignanesi give a talk on depression chaired by Majorie Wallace, founder of SANE. Now, coming from a family where the female line has been ravaged by depression over several generations, this is a subject very close to my heart. There was not a chance in the world that I was going to miss it, not for anything.

Sally Brampton is a journalist who started on Vogue, went on to work for The Observer, and then was one of the founding editors of Elle in the UK. She has also suffered from depression to the extent that she attempted suicide. She recently published a book called Shoot the Damn Dog, which is a memoir of her illness, and the ways in which she tried to overcome it. Don't panic, this isn't your misery memoir! This is a thoughtful, intelligent book that states right at the beginning: "My depression is not better or worse than anyone else's." As soon as I read that line (which I may have misquoted slightly because I don't have the book in front of me as I type) I knew I would love this book. So often people act the martyr to depression, and make a show of it, which is something I've never understood. Depression isn't glamorous, having it does not make you more interesting, or "deep", or creative, or mysterious, contrary to what some would have you believe. It is a horrible, sneaking illness that can quite literally destroy people.

Lisa Appignanesi's book is a more historical offering. Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind-Doctors is exactly what it sounds like. She was quite fascinating to listen to, as she spoke about the "fashions" that have permeated depression and its treatments over centuries. The talking cure, the rest cure, the surgical cure, and so on, right up to the fact that the government are currently investing a great deal of money into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and trying to train up 4,000 new counsellors. Which is great and everything, don't get me wrong, but CBT doesn't actually work for everyone. So where does that leave the rest of us, especially those of us that can't afford private therapists at £50 an hour. Women, too, have largely been the guinea pigs for these treatments, as women have historically had a higher rate of diagnosis of mental illness than men, which leads into all sorts of feminist questions, but I shant bore you here. Above all it sounds like the ideal follow-on read from Elaine Showalter's seminal book The Female Malady, which is up there in my Top 10 Favourite Books Ever Ever Ever. I don't think Lisa Appignanesi takes a specifically feminist approach, but it is no bad thing to read from different perspectives. I'm looking forward to it. Marjorie Wallace was also a wonderful speaker in her own right, and I'm determined to find out more about her - most of the mental health charity things I have looked into have been organised by MIND, so SANE isn't something I know a lot about... yet.

The talk itself was incredibly interesting, interspersed with touches of wry, dark humour, not leat as Sally recounted some of the most exotic therapies she had attempted in desperation after she found that she is one of the 30% of people for whom medication does not work. Amongst other things she tried various talking therapies, mystic healing, and art therapy ("but I just felt like a nit"). Eventually, though, she found the right type of therapy for her, and also recommended taking half hour walks every day. After the talk I had my copies of both books signed by the authors.

In a different sort of event entirely, this lunchtime Boyfriend, Academic Friend and I went to see Richard Dawkins talk about the books that have most inspired him. It was a varied selection which covered Carl Sagan, Elspeth Huxley, Michael Frayn, and Douglas Adams. It was hugely entertaining, not least because former-Dr Who girl and wife of Dawkins Lalla Ward was reading out excerpts from each text. The marquee was packed out, and as we got there a minute or two late, we were sitting right up at the back of the room.

Now, some people take dodgy photos of rock stars at gigs. I take dodgy photos of evolutionary biologists at literary festivals:

See? I promise you, that is him sitting in the middle, with Lalla on the right, and chairman David Freedman of Meet the Author on the left.  (An aside: it was after David Freedman showed me his iPhone that I got obsessed with them and ultimately went out and bought one).

I've been very good this festival, and only bought one book: the Lisa Appignanesi one. I've been sorely tempted by about a million others. I did, though, buy a bag which is just so me that I couldn't resist it:

If you can't read it because of the light bouncing off the shininess, it says:

"When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food." - Desiderius Erasmus.

Me too, Erasmus my man, me too.

Daughters of Decadence

I actually originally read this book of women's fin-de-siecle short stories last year, but it has been more or less a constant companion ever since. In those gaps where time is too short to read a healthy dose of whichever novel I am on, a quick dip into this wonderful collection is the perfect reading substitute.

Edited by Elaine Showalter (feminist academic and one of My Heroes), this collection rescues fin-de-siecle literature from the clutches of the dominant male writers of the time such as Wilde and Haggard. This was the time of the New Woman, and women were writing furiously. As Showalter says in her excellent introduction:

"Not only as heroines of drama, but also as competitors in marketplace, women were a major presence in the new literary world of the 1880s and 1890s. They were writing with unprecedented candour about female sexuality, marital discontent, and their own aesthetic theories and aspirations; and speaking to - and about - the New Women of the fin de siecle. Famous, even notorious, in their own day, these women writers have been overshadowed not only by such distinguished male contemporaries as Conrad and Wilde, but also by minor novelists like Haggard and Stoker."

It's time for the women to step forward and take the credit they are due. Arguably the most famous story in this collection is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper, which I defy anyone not to love. The story was written in the 1890s after she had been suffering from post-natal depression, and had been treated by Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. He had made her go through the rest cure, and she was not allowed to do anything by stay quietly in bed - she could not even read or write. Now, I can tell you here and now that if I was shut up somewhere in the country without recourse to a healthy dose of books I would be throwing myself out of a high window in fairly short order. Charlotte PG instead waited until she could write again and wrote this furious, eloquent, heartbreaking story of a woman in just such a situation, descending from depression into true madness in her confinement.

However, the lesser-known stories are just as wonderful. Kate Chopin - best known for her novella The Awakening - opens the collection with a very, very short story called An Egyptian Cigarette which sees a woman who smokes a cigarette brought back from Cairo for her and slips into a druggy dream of Egyptian Gods, and a mysterious man.

There is also a feminist counterpart for Conrad's The Heart of Darkness: Charlotte Mew's A White Night. It is narrated by the heroine's brother, Cameron, and follows Ella, Cameron, and Ella's new husband King on their honeymoon to Spain. There they witness the ritual burying alive of a veiled woman, which Showalter rightly calls "a warning of female destiny in the contexts of patriarchy", then sees the party's reaction to it. Ella is massively disturbed and transforms from strong New Woman into speechless hysteric, while Cameron believes that "the woman didn't really count", the whole thing was merely a "spectacle" and a "rather splendid crime".

These are all truly fantastic stories, and I heartily recommend that you all go and haste ye to a place where you can buy it. Go, go, go! You won't regret it.

(And what a gorgeous cover - lovely Virago designs strike again.)

Feminist Raving...

...by which, for once, I don't mean "raving" in the "ranting" sense. Oh no, I mean in the musical sense. Well, maybe a little ranting, if you'll humour me.

Last night Academic Friend and I went to 'Maeve's Feminist Rave' in East Oxford, held as part of the Oxford International Women's Festival. It was International Women's Day on Saturday 8 March - but I'm sure y'all don't need me to tell you that.

Now don't get the impression that Academic Friend and I were larging it up in a warehouse with glow sticks and whistles, oh no, this was an acoustic evening for women to come and play music. We had quite the variety of instruments: many guitars of course, but also a cello, a squeezebox, a violin, a tin whistle, and a very fine double bass player too. I'm not saying it was a night of stellar musical talent all the time, but it was a fun evening, and I'm really glad I went. It was organized by an excellent woman by the name of Maeve Bayton, who is a lecturer at Oxford University, and who wrote a book called Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music. Coincidentally, Frock Rock is published by Oxford, but please don't think this was in any way a work thing. The book came out 10 years ago, and I recently came across a second-hand copy. That it was published by the company I work for was nothing more than coincidence. Promise.

There were lots of posters etc from Amnesty International (to whom I renewed my membership this very morning) about violence against women, and I slyly pocketed a beer mat with some very disturbing statistics on it. I shall finish this post with those statistics, and it'll be my only rant, I swear:

• 33% of British people believe a woman is at least partly to blame for being raped if she wears sexy clothes, flirts or drinks.
• Today's conviction rate for rape cases is under 5.3% - but in 1977 it was 33%.

And remember:

• Sex without full, free and informed consent is a crime. Sentences for rape range from 2 to 14 years.

More information on Amnesty's Stop Violence Against Women campaign can be found at http://www.amnesty.org/svaw.

Oh, and another thing. This week there is an exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery (officially my favourite gallery ever) called Brilliant Women, which explores the extraordinary stories behind the spirited pioneers of sexual equality in the 18th century. Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Ann Yearsley, Elizabeth Montagu et al. Nice piece in The Times about it yesterday:

"As far as the life of the mind was concerned, it was death by embroidery. The intellect, much like the linen in a wedding trousseau, was best left unfolded. After all, a woman once married became a piece of property. And what husband wanted an opinionated wife? It would be as bizarre as a spaniel with a political point of view."

Quite. Me want to go see. Exhibition opens tomorrow.

Places to go, people to see...

Today, I am a little behind. Being stuck in bed for a week meant that I whizzed through a few books because frankly I was incapable of doing anything other than reading, sleeping, coughing, and drinking litres of orange squash. In the space of a week, I (finally) finished Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which I'm not planning to review here largely because I can't think of anything intelligent to say about it other than it took me a few chapters to get into it, it's a gory, rollicking, good fun book, the story is really nothing like the film, and if you're into a bit of Victorian weirdness then you could do far worse than to pick this one up. I'm not just saying that because I work for the publisher. Y'all know that I keep my work life and Other Stories life separate unless they genuinely overlap.

I also read the third Inspector Morse novel, The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn. Decent whodunnit. Buckets of sexism, which annoyed me. The other two books read were The Ice Palace by Terjei Varsaas, and Watch Me Disappear by Jill Dawson. Enjoyed both, and proper reviews are forthcoming, once I have time to down and formulate my thoughts and pencilled notes into something approximating a book review.

Meanwhile, I am in full-tilt MA mode, and have also been completely sucked into Vanity Fair when it comes to recreational reading. It's a big ole book is Vanity Fair, and given that I'm only getting time to get through 50 pages a day at the moment with everything else going on, then progress is not particularly speedy. However, Thursday is uni day, so at least I have an hour each way on the train to London to have a bit of read.

Talking of having a bit of a read, off you lot pop and take a gander and what's been floating my cyber-boat this week:

• I'm doing more posts on the good old OUPblog at the moment. Two this week - one on Captain Scott, the other on Prozac - with another one to come tomorrow.
• 1-15 March is the Oxford International Women's Festival. Hooray!
• 2007's Oddest Book Titles are...
• Scottish Friend and I went to see Juno last night - and it was fantastic. Knitter Friend reviewed it over on her blog too.
• The curious case of the forged biography.
• Following on from the stories I linked to yesterday, there's another good piece in The Independent today about violence against women.

A couple of these links will pop up on tomorrow's OUPblog link love post from me, so these will give you a head start. But do stop by tomorrow OUPblog post for bunnies and staircases and other stuff too.

Feminist Round-Up

"For decades mothers of young children have complained about not being taken seriously in the workplace, but research published today reveals for the first time the extent to which professional women are forced to slide down the career ladder to find jobs that allow them to spend time with their family."

A really interesting article in today's Guardian telling us what we feminists have been saying for years:  women suffer in their careers when they have children, while men largely don't.

Also in the Guardian today, a fantastic piece by Kira Cochrane on the high-profile misogynistic killers who have recently been convicted in the UK.

"The past week has brought us not one, but three horrific cases of misogyny-inspired murders, which have ended in the convictions of Bellfield, Mark Dixie and Steve Wright. In each case, what comes through most strongly is just how open, violent and persistent the killer's misogyny was, and how they were allowed to indulge it, and even boast of it, for years. The reports paint a picture of a society in which misogyny is taken as a given, in which someone can crow to his friends, without fear of redress or chastisement, as Bellfield did, that he had shaved himself from top to toe to ensure he didn't leave any DNA behind at a crime scene." (emphasis is mine)

We need strong articles like these to remind everyone that women do NOT have equality, and that we DO need feminism.

Women's Votes Anniversary

Just a short post today. I have come down with yet another cold so, while I made a promising start on A Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham last night, I was asleep rather early and didn't get through as much of it as I had intended. Still hopefully after the weekend I should have more bookish things to say.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday this week it was the 90th anniversary of the first wave of women getting the vote (the franchise widened to equal that of men at the time 10 years later). To celebrate this rather wonderful occasion, The Guardian have done a photo collage of pictures from the suffragette movement.

It's well worth a look.

Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith

It's very rare that a book makes me cry real, actual, physical tears, but Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith had me sobbing like a Brownie. Tears of happiness I might add: tears of happiness for the characters, and tears of happiness because the novel itself, the words Ali Smith had written, were just perfect.

The book is a modern-day retelling of the myth of Iphis, one of the few happy moments in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Iphis the girl is transformed into Iphis the boy in time to marry Ianthe (a girl), the love of her/his life. In Smith's version, there are two sisters in Inverness, Midge (or Imogen) and Anthea. Midge works for Pure, a company selling bottled water to the middle class masses, while Anthea is dreamier. Anthea falls in love with Robin - a girl with her name spelled the boys way - when she daubs anti-capitalist slogans on the outside of the Pure building.

As the chapters jump from Anthea's voice, to Midge's, and back, we see two sisters coming to terms with their lives and their loves and their true feelings. The endings for both girls are truly euphoric both in plot terms and in the tone of Smith's evocative, provocative stream of consciousness prose:

"We'd thought we were along, Robin and I. We'd thought it was just us, under the trees outside the cathedral. But as soon as we'd made our vows there was a great whoop of joy behind us, and when we turned round we saw all the people, there must have been hundreds, they were clapping and cheering, they were throwing confetti, they waved and they roared celebration."

Ali Smith is at her best, too, when she writes about love. Rarely do I find a writer that can encapsulate the very essence of what it feels like to be in love, but she does it. And she did it in this book time and time again... there were passages I read over and over again just to savour the words and sentences and the feelings they evoked. I could almost taste them.

"I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not known that I could be so much more than myself."

And as if all this didn't tick enough of my boxes, Girl Meets Boy also contains a heartfelt rallying cry for women's rights. I shall leave you with these words, as they appear in this marvelous, beautiful little gem of a book:

"...sexual or domestic violence affects one out of three women and girls worldwide and it is the world's leading cause of injury and death for women... THIS MUST CHANGE"

Go on yoursel', Ali.

Random Acts of Feminism

We all remember the Random Acts of Kindness fad a few years ago, but here are some Random Acts of Feminism to brighten up your day and show a little solidarity. My favourite?

I leave you with news of a famous toyshop, where a women's page reader (who shall remain nameless) spent a busy afternoon with her best friend and their daughters. Seeing a large pink plastic castle, she took pity on the blonde in the highest turret. Taking a card from her handbag and inscribing it neatly in black ink, she slid her small sign next to the princess's head. "Please let me out," it read, "I gotta get to work!"

Original article in The Guardian. Follow up over on the glorious F Word blog. The idea of sticky Post Its on lads' mags saying "Real Men Buy Books" also appeals.

Cop Out Link Post

A bit of a cop-out post today, I know, but I am busier than is truly decent. Sorry chaps. So, in the absence of me having anything remotely interesting to say, here is some link love from me to those who have entertained me via the internet this week.

• I really, really want this poster.
• This is (a) a fantastic name for a cat, and (b) a very amusing story. I'm a sucker for a cute cat story. From the BBC News Website.
• DoveGrey Reader sticks up for those of us not averse to a little pencilling in our book margins.
• The Victorian Web. I can lose whole hours just browsing about this site.
• Amazon in the States has launched their e-reader, the Kindle. Personally I hate the idea of any kind of e-reader, and I think this contraption looks not unlike the telephone we had at home in about 1989 (except without the screen, obviously). And why is it called The Kindle? I realise I am a crusty book purist. But I'm happy with that.
• Meanwhile, the OUPblog has a different view on the Kindle from the VP of Rights.
• Alasdair Gray's wonderful novel Lanark is the Guardian Book Club choice at the moment. Here's John Mullan on text as illustration.
• Will it soon be harder to have an abortion in Scotland than it is in England? The F Word investigates.
• Only 10 days till the Haggis Hunt starts again!
• The Reader Online features a poem by Anne Stevenson, called Poem for a Daughter.
• Excellent little book-related comic strip: Cat and Girl