WORDS OF LOVE: Passionate Women from Heloise to Sylvia Plath
by Pamela Norris
HarperPress, £25; 512pp
SHOULD ONE FEEL passionately nervous about a book when its subtitle appears to reduce many of the most highly regarded women writers to being merely “passionate”? In Words of Love, Pamela Norris has collected some of the most brilliant women in our history — Heloise, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji, a swath of medieval troubadours, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath — and, in her title, thrown a suffocating silk sheet over them.
What does Norris, whose first book, The Story of Eve (1998) was an excellent dissection of the genealogy of the myths surrounding our very first lady, mean by “passionate”? Readers are left to fathom that for themselves. Norris doesn’t fully explain in her introduction and this makes an otherwise fascinating, painstakingly researched ride (side saddle, naturally) through women in literature sag. I think that she means women in literature whose emotions extend to their life and lines. In which case, it’s hard to imagine finding an impassionate female scribe.
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Still, quibble aside, the stories of these women — stuck between gender inequality and their personal longings — and their fictional heroines and anti-heroines are rich and beautifully told. Words of Love is a book ended by a 12th-century French nun and a 20th-century American college girl, both associated with doomed love affairs. Heloise, the tortured abbess, has gained mythical status for her love affair with the philosopher Peter Abelard, her tutor. When her uncle discovered the relationship he ordered Abelard’s castration, while Heloise fled to a convent where she made a religious career for herself, later writing letters shot through with her emotional and sexual yearnings. At the other end of the timeline hangs Sylvia Plath, the brilliant poet and wife of Ted Hughes, who, Norris argues, was haunted by the question, of what kind of woman was she meant to be? Norris, careful not to condemn Hughes, describes a life in brief with great sophistication.
Norris’s strength is that she lets the stories unwind themselves, occasionally finding chilling déjà vu in lives separated by many centuries: Plath’s childhood “showing off”, dancing for her father, reminds her of Paula Rego’s lithograph illustrating Adele, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, dancing for Mr Rochester. Whether describing Millay’s early years of “domestic drudgery”, or Barrett Browning’s yearning for a poetic role model — “I look everywhere for Grandmothers and see none” — the writer remains admirably controlled and avoids slipping into sisterly self-pity. If only Barrett Browning could stretch her hand through time, place her internet order, and get hold of a copy. She would find the “grandmothers” that so eluded her and meet the daughters she would reap. Perhaps she’d even have something to say about the title.