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Apology for the Woman Writing
Marie longs to frequent Parisian salons with the intellectual elite but, at much the same time as Shakespeare’s sister would have seen her literary ambitions founder, she has her dreams punctured by a mother who goads her with questions such as "What is in that roomful of words that you like so much?" Marie has one ally in her father’s brother, Louis, a playwright who brings her books on his regular visits. In 1584, he changes her life by introducing her to the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne created a new literary genre: the essay; in French, an attempt or try-out, in which classical tales and social observation were interwoven with personal revelation. Marie puts it neatly: "He writes about himself as if he were describing the world, and the world as if he were describing himself." She becomes obsessed — even possessed — by his writing, falling to the ground and speaking so wildly that her sister takes her to be in the throes of religious ecstasy. Her sole desire is to serve as Montaigne’s disciple and, when uncle Louis takes her to Paris, she engineers a meeting with her hero. Montaigne is flattered but disappointed by Marie’s ungainliness and increasingly frustrated by her insistence that she is the sole reader who can truly understand him. He is appalled when she stabs herself in a show of devotion and declares her his "fille d’alliance" to forestall further bloodshed. While recuperating from a serious illness at her family chateau, he inserts a laudatory paragraph about her into an existing essay. Once Montaigne returns to Bordeaux, Marie never sees him again. She sends him her novel, which he tactfully ignores. Then, after her husband’s death, Madame de Montaigne asks Marie to oversee a new edition of the essays. Marie seizes the opportunity to stress her relationship and to launch her own literary career, but she inserts a vainglorious preface and expands Montaigne’s brief allusions to her. Diski has cleverly adapted the historical sources to fashion an exceedingly literary novel. The first part, covering Marie’s relationship with Montaigne, works better than the second, which picks out incidents from her long and miserable life. What the novel lacks is any emotional charge. Marie herself, untalented, hysterical, self-deluded and stubborn, never engages our sympathies. Nevertheless, Diski’s cool, modulated prose exhibits the moderation so prized by Montaigne, and Marie’s fate offers a salutary warning to those of us who love books that there can be a danger in loving them too much. By arrangement with The Independent
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MANY
novels have explored the experience of writing, far fewer that of
reading. Its title notwithstanding, Apology for the Woman Writing is
one of the latter. The heroine, Marie de Gournay, lacks both the
domestic virtues desirable in a wife and the religious faith required of
a nun, thus depriving herself of a secure future in late 16th-century
France. Instead, she pores over the 200 volumes in her late father’s
library, thrilled by the realisation that "behind each individual
book was a mind".