Women Writers in the Process of Re-Creation

‘A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again’By Joanna BiggsEcco, 272 pagesThe ninth writer in Joanna Biggs’ group biography is the author herself, whose own beginning again, after a divorce, prompts her to inquire into how other women have re-created themselves.The other eight, in order of appearance, are Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neal Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Only their first names appear on the Contents page — as if they are friends of the author.Ms. Biggs has taken these writers to heart, measuring her own fitful starts and stops against a Wollstonecraft who attempted suicide twice and married happily, and against a Elena Ferrante who shows us why female friendship is one of the most valuable resources a woman has.Some chapters are more successful than others, and how you react to them may depend on how much you already know about these women. For me, Zora Neal Hurston, who simply refused to be bound by racial issues — even when they hurt her among the Black literati — and George Eliot are the standouts.Eliot is the star of this book because “Middlemarch” works so well for Ms. Biggs’s purposes, which are to show how over time reactions to books and to herself change and surprise her.Eliot wrote deeply intellectual pieces for the Westminster Review, but could she write fiction, creating a whole world in which her ideas could be embodied? She doubted herself, but like Virginia Woolf, who had stalwart husband Leonard to backstop her, Eliot had George Henry Lewes, who knew how to inspire her with his first reading of her scenes that proved she could write fiction. At the end of the book, Ms. Biggs confesses she wonders the same about herself. Will she be able to write the novel that has been her dream, and will that fiction coincide with a partner or friend, female or male, who will be there to abet her effort?The Eliot chapter is indicative of the time it takes to know yourself, and that the time it takes is not something that can be understood until the time it takes has elapsed.The younger Ms. Biggs, observing Dorothea Brooke, “endowed with money, status, ability, and above all idealism,” was “disappointed by her slide into domestic anonymity … I understood Dorothea’s desire for more, though I was grossed out at the thought of marrying someone like Casaubon, I understood that she might want someone to learn from if universities for women didn’t exist.” Yet, as Ms. Biggs comes to realize through her own failed marriage, the youthful urge to have it all settled, to be married — even if it’s to a dry as dust elderly Casaubon-like scholar — can be overwhelming, and only later leads to the realization of self-defeat.In short, it has taken Ms. Biggs several years to appreciate the evolution of Dorothea Brooke even as Ms. Biggs is assessing her own failures of self-knowledge.“A Life of One’s Own” has the wonderful particularity of biography that thwarts the prescriptive: Marriage can be godsend, as it was for Wollstonecraft and Woolf; a disaster, as for Sylvia Plath (though Ted Hughes is not portrayed as a villain); or an episode that should apparently be forgotten as soon as possible, à la Toni Morrison.And Elena Ferrante? Who knows? She has made it a project to remain as elusive as possible, preferring to have her fiction do all the work uninterrupted by what the public thinks about the person who wrote it. What bemuses Ms. Biggs is the friendship that is also the dichotomy between Lenù and Lila, in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet: “Who is the genius? Is it Lila, who can synthesize different ideas to make original and dazzling wholes? Is it Lenù, who can fix so much life and feeling on the page? The question is unanswerable, and maybe beside the point altogether, because it is the dynamic between them that produces so much of the movement and excitement of the book. It is a question that Lila and Lenù are naturally obsessed by, but as I reread it this time, I felt less able to judge.”Exactly. It is what George Eliot believed that great literature could do: “extend reader’s sympathies,” Ms. Biggs observes. But you have to take the time, as she does, to get the point.Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming “Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955.”

Women Writers in the Process of Re-Creation

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