Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781480412422
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The phenomenon is not new. Readers and listeners made tracks to Snorri Sturluson, twelfth-century writer of Icelandic sagas, poet, politician and historian. They came, over snow and tundra, by horse and cart and reindeer and sleigh. The questions would have been the same then as they are now. ‘Mr Sturluson, do you work regular hours or do you wait for inspiration to strike? Do you take notice of what the critics say? Of what the King says?’ (He had better have paid more attention to the latter: he came to a sorry end by the King’s hand.) ‘What were the early influences on your work?’

Human nature does not change over the centuries. If one writer is born to every five hundred non-writers, so are five critics and ten sceptics, twenty questioners and, thank God, one hundred simple readers: the proportion was the same in the twelfth century as it is today: only the scale is different, and (in the West) there are lighter penalties for writing what displeases, and thinking what is inconvenient. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society. Elizabeth Bennet, that wayward, capricious girl, listening to the beat of feeling, rather than the pulsing urge for survival, paying attention to the subtle demands of human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention, must have quite upset a number of her readers, changed their minds, and with their minds, their lives, and with their lives, the society they lived in: prodding it quicker and faster along the slow, difficult road that has led us out of barbarity into civilization.

Now, the questions asked last night by the readers of Canberra, those same questions asked of Sturluson and Tolstoy and George Eliot and any writer who even once ventures a public opinion on the way the world is run, and their relation to it, are sensible enough. They are what I ask other writers. They are what I would ask Jane Austen if I were her contemporary. They are the questions that her biographers try to answer for her.

I think they sometimes get it wrong. I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way.

Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‘And who is this Mr Knightley I see on the third line down? Is he going to marry Emma?’ (I daresay two chapters into the work she simply didn’t know, but no reader/visitor is going to believe a thing like that.

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