Virginia’s Sisters E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 382

Beschreibung

A unique anthology of short stories and poetry by feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, who were writing about work, discrimination, war, relationships, sexuality and love in the early part of the 20th Century.

Includes works by English and American writers Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Radclyffe Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, alongside their recently rediscovered ‘sisters’ from around the world. This book offers a diverse and international array of over 20 literary gems from women writers living in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.

List of authors and works included:

A Woman by Fani Popova-Mutafova (translated by Petya Pavlova)
Thoughts by Myra Viola Wilds
The Little Governess by Katherine Mansfield
Villa Myosotis by Sorana Gurian (translated by Gabi Reigh)
The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf
Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself [extract] by Radclyffe Hall
I sit and sew by Alice Dunbar Nelson
First Steps [extract] by Dorka Talmon (translated by Mira Glover)
Coming Home by Maria Messina (translated by Juliette Neil)
Vegetal Reverie by Magda Isanos (translated by Gabi Reigh)
The Iceberg by Zelda Fitzgerald
The Russian Princess by Carmen de Burgos (translated by Slava Faybysh)
Bring to Me All… by Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Nina Kossman)
Autres Temps by Edith Wharton
Unheard by Yente Serdatsky (translated by Dalia Wolfson)
Fog by Gabriela Mistral (translated by Stuart Cooke)
Natalia [extract] by Fausta Cialente (translated by Laura Shanahan)
What makes this century worse? by Anna Akhmatova (translated by Olga Livshin)
Broken by Nataliya Kobrynska (translated by Hanna Leliv & Slava Faybysh)
Sunset by Antonia Pozzi (translated by Sonia di Placido)
Once Upon A Time by Ling Shuhua (translated by Leilei Chen)
Their Religions and our Marriages: Herland [extract] by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Goodbye Lebanon by May Ziadeh (translated by Rose DeMaris)

Leseprobe

Gabi Reigh

Gabi Reigh moved to the U.K. from Romania at the age of 12 and now teaches A-level English. In 2017, she won the Stephen Spender Prize which inspired her to translate more Romanian literature. As part of her Interbellum Series project, she has translated interwar novels, poetry and drama by Lucian Blaga, Liviu Rebreanu, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, Max Blecher and Mihail Sebastian and her essay on the art of translation is featured in The Women Writer’s Handbook (Aurora Metro Books).

Gabi’s translations, articles and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, Another Chicago Magazine, Open Democracy, Times Educational Supplement, The London Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ Tom Gallon short story prize in 2018.

First published in the UK in 2023 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.

80 Hill Rise, Richmond, TW10 6UB UK

www.aurorametro.com [email protected]

t: @aurorametro F: facebook.com/AuroraMetroBooks

Introduction copyright © 2023 Gabi Reigh

Compilation copyright © 2023 Gabi Reigh

Cover image: Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Self-Portrait (as “New Woman”), 1896, Library of Congress collection

Cover design: copyright © 2023 Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.

Editor: Cheryl Robson

Aurora Metro Books would like to thank Bushra Mustafa-Dunne, Sze Hang Lo

The works reproduced in this book are published either with permission from the artist or author’s estate or they are in the public domain. Copyright in the English translations of the works herein remains with the individual translators.

All rights are strictly reserved. For rights enquiries please contact the publisher: [email protected]

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBNs:978-1-912430-78-9 (print)978-1-912430-79-6 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction by Gabi Reigh

A Woman by Fani Popova-Mutafova

translated by Petya Pavlova

Thoughts by Myra Viola Wilds

The Little Governess by Katherine Mansfield

Villa Myosotis by Sorana Gurian

translated by Gabi Reigh

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf

Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself [extract] by Radclyffe Hall

I sit and sew by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

First Steps [extract] by Dorka Talmon

translated by Mira Glover

Coming Home by Maria Messina

translated by Juliette Neil

Vegetal Reverie by Magda Isanos

translated by Gabi Reigh

The Iceberg by Zelda Fitzgerald

The Russian Princess by Carmen de Burgos

translated by Slava Faybysh

Bring to Me All by Marina Tsvetaeva

translated by Nina Kossman

Autres Temps by Edith Wharton

Unheard by Yenta Serdatsky

translated by Dalia Wolfson

Fog by Gabriela Mistral

translated by Stuart Cooke

Natalia [extract] by Fausta Cialente

translated by Laura Shanahan

What makes this century worse? by Anna Akhmatova

translated by Olga Livshin

Broken by Nataliya Kobrynska

translated by Hanna Leliv

Sunset by Antonia Pozzi

translated by Sonia di Placido

Once Upon A Time by Ling Shuhua

Translated by Leilei Chen 莫譯

Their Religions and our Marriages – Herland [extract]

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Goodbye Lebanon by May Ziadeh

translated by Rose DeMaris

About the Authors

About the Translators

Introduction

Gabi Reigh

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Virginia Woolf’s much quoted line from A Room of One’s Own seems an appropriate place to begin an introduction to this collection of women’s writing from the first half of the twentieth century. Although some of the writers and artists included in this anthology such as Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Marina Tsvetaeva and Gabriela Mistral are well-known, the collection also brings to light the creativity of Virginia Woolf’s “sisters” from thirteen different countries who have not received the global recognition they deserve and whose work has been translated into English for the first time, from eleven different languages.

The idea for this anthology began with my own obsession with a particular writer: Sorana Gurian (1913-1956), a Jewish-Romanian intellectual who was part of the underground opposition in fascist Romania during the Second World War. After fleeing persecution in Romania, she lived in Italy, Israel and eventually in Paris, where she died of cancer at the age of 43. Gurian wrote books in Romanian and in French, and while she achieved some level of recognition during her writing career in Paris, her earlier short story collections such as The Days will Never Return and Episodes between Twilight and Darkness disturbed the Romanian communist regime due to the “‘decadent’ amoralism, cosmopolitanism, defiant pessimism and eroticism”1with which they explored the inner lives of single women. This rebellion against the tastes of the establishment of her native country as well as Gurian’s marginalised position as a (female) foreigner in France meant that Czeslow Milosz’s prophecy, formulated in an article about his encounter with Gurian during her final days in Paris, was broadly fulfilled: “The name of Sorana Gurian will not be preserved in the chronicles of humanity.”

When I first read Mislosz’s account of this meeting – one of a tiny handful of articles written in English about Sorana Gurian – I was intrigued and saddened by the fate of this “lost” writer. I also took his words as a challenge to rescue her from the shadows of anonymity by giving her work a new life through translating it into English. But here I was faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle – how do you persuade publishers to print a translation of a writer whose work, although fresh, daring and beautiful, is largely unknown? I came to the conclusion that although Sorana Gurian might not attract a readership of her own, the very fact that she was an “obscure” female writer cheated of her place in the early twentieth century canon placed her in a sisterhood of many other female artists who shared her fate.

The idea then sprang to my mind that an anthology of their work, exploring the connections between their lives and themes, could be even more compelling. In their satirical art installation, the anonymous collective Guerrilla Girls wryly noted that one of “the Advantages of Being a Woman Artist” is “being included in revised versions of art history.” Although this silver lining might strike us as bitter-sweet, I concluded that there is strength in numbers and that a collection of texts written by women from this period would amplify their voices.

In parallel with other texts included in this anthology, Sorana Gurian’s ‘Villa Myosotis’ explores a woman’s attempt to carve out an independent life in the shadow of personal struggles and dominant male influences. The story is a dreamlike reimagining of events in Gurian’s own life; having been diagnosed with tuberculosis in her twenties, Gurian received treatment in the sanatorium town of Berck, in France, and whilst there, she discovered that she had occupied the same room as another Jewish-Romanian writer she admired, Max Blecher, who had died of the disease a year earlier. From this unsettling coincidence, Gurian developed a ghost story that allegorically reenacts her struggle to escape the spectre of death and the stifling influence of the male genius on her own creative development.

Like the rest of the stories in Episodes between Twilight and Darkness, ‘Villa Myosotis’ disturbed the wholesome, optimistic narrative that was taking shape in communist Romania, and consequently Gurian’s art was not given the attention it deserved. This was a common motif for the writers included in this anthology. Yenta Serdatsky’s story ‘Unheard’ acts as a symbol of their condition. Her heroine’s attempts to express herself are constantly stymied by the voices of her male friends whose egotistical discourse renders her silent: “She wants to open up but the words get stuck in her throat… if only she could talk things out, have some relief from the weight on her heart.” Serdatsky’s protagonist might be voicing the author’s own disappointments as her writing career faltered after misogynistic reviews of her short story collections and the fact that she was undercompensated, in comparison to her male colleagues, for her articles for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts.

Other writers found that, when the world did not listen to them, poetry gave them a voice. Despite her privileged upbringing as the child of aristocratic parents, the Italian poet Antonia Pozzi struggled to reconcile their expectations, her faith and her desire for romantic fulfilment and took her own life at the age of 26. Although her artistic voice was “unheard” during her lifetime, as all of her poems were published posthumously, Pozzi wrote in a letter to a friend that poetry gave her a psychological escape from the world. “The purpose of poetry”, Pozzi writes, is “to take all the pain that agitates us and roars in our soul and mollify it, to transfigure it in the supreme calm of art, in the way the rivers flow into the vast blue sea. Poetry is a catharsis of pain, as the immensity of death is a catharsis of life.”

The poetry of Anna Akhmatova, May Ziadeh and Magda Isanos also transforms pain into lyrical beauty. Persecuted and censored by the Stalinist authorities, Anna Akhmatova chose to remain in the Soviet Union even after her first husband was executed and her son was sent to a gulag, chronicling the “painful ulcer” of the social turmoil she witnessed in her poetry. The Palestinian-Lebanese poet May Ziadeh expresses the bereavement of the emigree in ‘Goodbye, Lebanon’, Myra Viola Wilds finds solace in her writing when her failing eyesight stops her from working as a dressmaker, while Magda Isanos, a Romanian poet whose brief life was tormented by polio, escapes her suffering through a ‘Vegetal Reverie’: “Unburdened of my soul/ I flee/ Towards the valleys, where the trees/Will share life with me/Muting all thoughts with flowers”. Poetry becomes “the catharsis of pain”, a space where, as Emily Dickinson put it, “the soul… stand[s] ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience” and transcend the trials of the material world.

As well as physical suffering and political persecution, the texts in this anthology also highlight the challenges faced by women in patriarchal societies. From the very moment of their birth, as captured in Fani Popova-Mutafova’s ‘A Woman’, where a baby girl is “greeted with disappointment, resignation and condescension” by everyone except her mother, the women in these short stories are forced to recognise their precarious foothold in the world.

In Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Little Governess’, the vulnerability of single women is startlingly exposed when the protagonist’s trust is exploited by an older man. Maria Messina, described by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia as the “Italian Katherine Mansfield”, explores the trials of marriage in the conservative society of early twentieth century Sicily in ‘Coming Home’, where an unhappily married young woman receives no encouragement from her family to break away from an unfulfilling relationship. Vanna, the heroine of the story, feels that marriage has transformed her into “a rag doll”, “an ant”, a “nothing” because her husband feels embarrassed by her as he tries to reinvent himself in Rome and obscure his Sicilian origins.

“To be rooted”, wrote Simone Weil, “is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.” Like Vanna, Maria Messina understood the alienation caused by leaving one’s home and arriving to the mainland as an outsider; although she escaped her rural roots by teaching herself to read and write before embarking on a literary career, she could never detach herself emotionally from the place of her birth even though, just like for her heroine, “there was no room for her [there]”.

“There was no room”, either, for divorced older women, even in the sophisticated, seemingly progressive circles of early twentieth century New York. In Edith Wharton’s ‘Autre Temps’, Mrs. Lidcote returns home after a self-imposed exile in Europe following her divorce, to comfort her daughter after her own marriage breaks down. To her surprise, she discovers that her daughter’s experience of divorce has been very different to her own, as the young woman has maintained her position in society. Yet ironically, Mrs. Lidcote is still regarded as a persona non grata in her native city because of her past. Considering this change in social mores and the injustice of being stigmatised by her divorce from many years ago, Mrs. Lidcote bitterly wonders: “If such a change was to come, why had it not come sooner?”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the choices that women made in their personal lives could mean the difference between social integration and alienation. Simone de Beauvoir reflected that: “on the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”

While the commitment to a single life or the breakdown of marriage lowered women’s social status, the pursuit of a same-sex relationship was an even greater gamble to take, an “assertion of the self” that was a vital “source of life” but also threatened the “mortal danger” of social exclusion. Fausta Cialente’s debut novel, Natalia, was banned by Fascist authorities because it contained a “small lesbian episode” and a revised version was published in 1982. The same taboo topic was explored by two women writing at the same time in different continents – Ling Shuhua and Radclyffe Hall. The daughter of a concubine and a high-ranking official, Ling Shuhua’s short stories became popular in her native China in the 1920s and 1930s. Interestingly, Shuhua became connected with the Bloomsbury circle through a twist of fate. While studying at Wuhan university, she began a romantic relationship with Vanessa Bell’s son Julian and this led to a correspondence between Shuhua and Virginia Woolf, to whom she dedicated her memoirs. Later, Shuhua moved to England and met Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville-West, in person. Shuhua’s modern, liberal attitudes are reflected in ‘Once upon a time’, which portrays the forbidden relationship between two female students with warmth and compassion.

Like ‘Once upon a Time’, Radclyffe Hall’s ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ reflects the frustration felt by queer women who could not express their desires at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also offers an insight into how the First World War impacted their lives. Best known for her groundbreaking novel The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall is one of the early twentieth century’s most prominent figures to write openly about lesbian relationships. In ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’, she paints the portrait of a woman whose behaviour and desires place her on the edges of society and make her feel alienated from her family, so much so, that it takes the chaos of war to free her from their expectations and allow her to take an active role in shaping the world’s events. In contrast, in the poem ‘I Sit and Sew’, the Harlem Renaissance writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson expresses her frustration with the fact that, as a woman, she cannot contribute to the war effort.

A very different perspective of war is offered in Natalya Kobrynska’s short story ‘Broken’. The translator Hanna Leliv was living in war-torn Ukraine when she submitted this story to the anthology, explaining that she found poignant parallels between its depiction of a family destroyed by the First World War and events that were affecting her home country in the present day. Kobrynska’s story stands out from the rest of the texts included in the anthology because rather than being narrated solely from a female perspective, it uses both the husband and the wife as focalisers, as if to highlight the damage that war indiscriminately causes to everyone, male or female, as lives are destroyed for obscure political ends.

Many of the short stories and poems included in this anthology convey the trials experienced by women at different stages of their lives, in various social contexts. However, both the texts and the lives of the writers themselves bear testament to female strength and resilience. Carmen de Burgos’s ‘The Russian Princess’ portrays a character in the winter of her life who refuses to “go gentle into that good night”, challenging instead, the patriarchal world that judges women according to their youth and beauty. The self-proclaimed “Russian Princess”, rising from the ashes of obscure old age, brings to mind Marina Tsvetaeva’s evocation of female power – “I am the Phoenix; only in the fire I sing.”

Like the characters they created, the writers also found the courage to challenge tradition and reshape their societies. Carmen de Burgos was the first woman in Spain to become a war correspondent and have her own column in a newspaper. May Ziadeh and Natalia Kobrynska campaigned for women’s rights and Gabriela Mistral wrote articles arguing that education should be available to people of all social classes. Like Virginia Woolf, who famously claimed that a woman “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, Charlotte Perkins Gillman also encouraged women to become financially independent through lecture tours and her book Women and Economics.

Perkins Gillman is best known for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, an analysis of suffocating domesticity and postpartum depression, as well as an indictment of the “rest cure” that was often enforced on women experiencing mental health problems. “The rest cure”, developed by the 19th century physician Silas Weir Mitchell, was seen by Perkins Gillman as a tyrannical sanction aimed to silence women’s voices when they disrupted the patriarchal establishment with their “hysterical” demands. In her 1915 feminist utopian novel Herland, Perkins Gillman imagines an exclusively female society devoid of such power dynamics, where women encourage each other to fulfil their potential:

“They developed their central theory of a Loving Power and assumed that its relation to them was motherly – that it desired their welfare and especially their development. Their relation to it, similarly, was filial, a loving appreciation and a glad fulfilment of its high purposes. Then, being nothing if not practical, they set their keen and active minds to discover the kind of conduct expected of them. This worked out in a most admirable system of ethics. The principle of Love was universally recognised – and used.”

Other women took it upon themselves to build real life utopias. Dorka Talmon, an active participant in the Polish socialist movement, fled from antisemitic persecution in Europe and became one of the founding members of a Kibbutz in Israel. Talmon recalls the “creationist” joy she felt as she anticipated belonging to a community where gender, nationality and class were unimportant and where everyone worked for the common good. Although she does not gloss over the “excruciating” and “acrimonious” debates between the commune’s members about the technicalities of this utopia, Talmon nevertheless holds on to her faith that it is possible to build a better society: “We knew that without compromise and sensitivity, treating every member as a human being, we could not resolve continuous challenges and crises.”

Talmon’s account of her life would have never gained a readership beyond her immediate circle were it not for the fact that another woman, Mira Glover, who had grown up on the same Kibbutz and emigrated to England in the 1970s, found it in the commune’s archives and submitted it to this anthology.

There are many other “Virginia’s Sisters” out there whose voices are yet to reach us and I hope that, with time, the literary canon might expand and give them the pride of place they deserve. Even more importantly, perhaps, the resurrection of these forgotten literary ancestors might convince other women, who have never had the confidence to write, that their stories deserve to be heard. As Virginia Woolf’s celebrated modernist short story tells us, even the minutiae of our ordinary lives, the smallest “mark on the wall”, can be transformed into art.

As Hélène Cixous wrote: “I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all of her own which she had been secretly haunting since childhood… I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim, ‘I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.”2

1Burta-Cernat, Bianca. 2011. Group Portrait of Forgotten Women

2The Laugh of the Medusa, by Hélène Cixous, translated by Paula and Keith Cohen

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

– Virginia Woolf

A Woman1

Fani Popova-Mutafova

translated by Petya Pavlova

A strange silence fell, full of quivering tension. Stranger still, as only a moment ago the room was brimming with all shades of human worry: the screams of the mother, the firm encouragement of the doctor, the pleading and weeping of her loved ones.

And now, silence.

And a weak, hot whisper:

“What is it?”

The doctor’s gaze quickly brushes against the tiny red body, he smiles benevolently, his voice resounds with feigned enthusiasm:

“A girl.”

This is how a woman comes into the world.

Greeted with disappointment, resignation and cond-escension. The mother is silent, listening to the child’s cries, which pierce her heart with feelings she has never before experienced.

A girl. She sighs. And immediately realises that her disappointment does not come from within. Her arms open with the same warmth to take the newborn – regardless of whether it is a boy or a girl, her lips touch the delicate skin of the child’s face with the same thirst; she presses the helpless body to her breast with the same immeasurable devotion. Perhaps, precisely because the newborn is a girl, a powerful feeling of care and protectiveness that will not leave her for the rest of her life, surges inside of her.

She gently strokes the delicate, dark-haired head with the tips of her fingers and smiles. Yet, from the first moment, she has started to defend her.

To defend her from the disappointment, from the coldness of the father, from the condescending smiles of relatives, from the insulting wishes for male offspring in the near future.

And the little girl falls asleep quietly, innocent as a small animal, her head resting trustingly on her mother’s arm. Far away are the days when her heart would sicken at the difference between her female status and the proud brotherhood of men, the moment when the certainty of the inferiority of her sex will sink into her like a poison arrow. Mankind’s lies have not yet touched the beauty of her spirit.

The man approaches excited. Different feelings fleet across his face – resignation, curiosity. But his eyes do not glow with the deep delight the mother has been imagining in the sleepless nights of the last few weeks. Not at all. There is no jubilation in his voice; his smile and his display of happiness are just a polite mask. With a guilty look, the mother turns her face to him, silently begging for forgiveness, for mercy; she watches his every look, every move, with a heavy heart.

A sharp pain eases inside her and a gentle glow spreads across her pale, grey, face as she notices the boundless amazement, awkwardness, love and fear with which the man takes the child, the man in whom the father is slowly born, the man who, with horror and joy, sees himself as a caricature in this tiny, wrinkled face.

During the night the mother suddenly wakes up, reaches for the crib with a worried face, and in the dim light tries to distinguish the features of the child, who is breathing deeply and quietly, with arms raised in little fists, one at each side of her head.

This is how it is going to be from now on. She will never have a moment of calm.

When snow blizzards cover the earth in a silent blanket of white, when the moon rises in the azure blue of the sky and fills the night with a mysterious radiance, when April winds shake the blossom from the branches and soft lights descend from the pink sky, when heavy mists press the sleeping earth and when cold rain lashes against the black windows – the mother’s heart will tremble with worry: is her child happy? Is a hidden misfortune lurking? What does fate have in store for her? Will fame crown her precious forehead or will thorns draw blood from it? How many storms and how many precipices will hinder her footsteps? How many sunny moments will she enjoy and how much darkness will she endure?

And the mother is already alert, lying awake, untangling daydreams and worries.

A little girl was born. What would her path be like, bearing the cross of being a woman – to be a slave to nature, a cathode ray producing a spark of life?

She would live in the world of men, and in that world, she would seek to prove her worth, pointlessly chasing after male adoration or silently enduring the injustices of her female lot.

Her innate instinct to please others, to try to be fascinating, to be attracted to beautiful, glamourous objects, would be ridiculed and condemned. Her strong connection with nature would be undermined, her gift of fertility would be downplayed, the little joy that nature had bestowed upon her as a mother would be denied, but the hardship would remain.

At times, they would elevate her to the holy image of the Virgin Mother and at others bring her down into the mud, reduced to a level below that of an animal, which is at least pure and noble in its instincts. She would be surrounded by minders like a small child: the father, the brothers, the husband, the sons.

To free herself, she would choose between the wrong path and the joyless path, either by renouncing her female condition and seeking other opportunities for her spirit through hard work like a man, struggling to bring up children as a mother and working like a man to provide for her family. In this way she would go against God’s will, taking on a double curse – to make a living with the sweat of her brow and to endure the pain of childbirth...

Or maybe she would look for new ways to gain power and influence to establish the parity of her kind, but then the women accustomed to the old yoke would be the first to assail her with insults...

A dark road to travel with no clear borders, with no clear goal...

***

The mother sighed and took the child in her arms. Its closeness made her melt with tenderness. She gently stroked the dark cheeks, the ears, the tiny nose, inhaled its warm scent, looked at the tiny nails and the tightly-shut eyelids with amazement. And she still couldn’t believe that all of this was hers, just hers, and could not comprehend the miracle that had torn this part of her from her flesh, and turned it into something separate and independent.

For the hundredth time she explored the bland features; tried to find in them something of herself, of her husband. Several generations were hiding there, invisibly, wanting to live again in this fresh blood.

The eyebrows belonged to a grandfather, the forehead to an uncle, the mouth to a grandmother.

This is how this first night passes, shrouded in the blue light of the night lamp, as if removed from all the days and nights on earth.

The morning light brings new joys, new surprises.

For the first time, the hungry, searching mouth of the child suckles her breast and then the mother suddenly feels at one with her deepest essence, and her vague sense of worry fades away – this is what it means to be a woman. Giving herself to the child to the last drop of blood.

Because her kingdom is called Love.

1first published in 1936

Thoughts

Myra Viola Wilds

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry

In your travels day by day

Are they bright and lofty visions,

Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy,

Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought;

Man, though high may be his station,

Is no better than his thoughts.

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly,

Let each one an honour be;

Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly,

Then in love set each one free.

“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

– Virginia Woolf

The Little Governess1

Katherine Mansfield

Oh, dear, how she wished that it wasn’t night-time. She’d have much rather travelled by day, much much rather. But the lady at the Governess Bureau said: “You had better take an evening boat and then if you get into a compartment for ‘Ladies Only’ in the train you will be far safer than sleeping in a foreign hotel. Don’t go out of the carriage; don’t walk about the corridors and be sure to lock the lavatory door if you go there. The train arrives at Munich at eight o’clock, and Frau Arnholdt says that the Hotel Grunewald is only one minute away. A porter can take you there. She will arrive at six the same evening, so you will have a nice quiet day to rest after the journey and rub up your German. And when you want anything to eat I would advise you to pop into the nearest baker’s and get a bun and some coffee. You haven’t been abroad before, have you?”

“No.”

“Well, I always tell my girls that it’s better to mistrust people at first rather than trust them, and it’s safer to suspect people of evil intentions rather than good ones… It sounds rather hard but we’ve got to be women of the world, haven’t we?”

It had been nice in the Ladies’ Cabin. The stewardess was so kind and changed her money for her and tucked up her feet. She lay on one of the hard pink-sprigged couches and watched the other passengers, friendly and natural, pinning their hats to the bolsters, taking off their boots and skirts, opening dressing-cases and arranging mysterious rustling little packages, tying their heads up in veils before lying down. Thud, thud, thud, went the steady screw of the steamer. The stewardess pulled a green shade over the light and sat down by the stove, her skirt turned back over her knees, a long piece of knitting on her lap. On a shelf above her head there was a water-bottle with a tight bunch of flowers stuck in it. “I like travelling very much,” thought the little governess. She smiled and yielded to the warm rocking.

But when the boat stopped and she went up on deck, her dress-basket in one hand, her rug and umbrella in the other, a cold, strange wind flew under her hat. She looked up at the masts and spars of the ship, black against a green glittering sky, and down to the dark landing-stage where strange, muffled figures lounged, waiting; she moved forward with the sleepy flock, all knowing where to go to and what to do except her, and she felt afraid. Just a little – just enough to wish – oh, to wish that it was daytime and that one of those women who had smiled at her in the glass, when they both did their hair in the Ladies’ Cabin, was somewhere near now.

“Tickets, please. Show your tickets. Have your tickets ready.”

She went down the gangway balancing herself carefully on her heels. Then a man in a black leather cap came forward and touched her on the arm. “Where for, Miss?” He spoke English – he must be a guard or a stationmaster with a cap like that. She had scarcely answered when he pounced on her dress-basket.

“This way,” he shouted, in a rude, determined voice, and elbowing his way he strode past the people. “But I don’t want a porter.” What a horrible man! “I don’t want a porter. I want to carry it myself.” She had to run to keep up with him, and her anger, far stronger than she, ran before her and snatched the bag out of the wretch’s hand. He paid no attention at all, but swung on down the long dark platform, and across a railway line.

“He is a robber.” She was sure he was a robber as she stepped between the silvery rails and felt the cinders crunch under her shoes. On the other side – oh, thank goodness! – there was a train with Munich written on it. The man stopped by the huge lighted carriages. “Second class?” asked the insolent voice.

“Yes, a Ladies’ compartment.” She was quite out of breath. She opened her little purse to find something small enough to give this horrible man while he tossed her dress-basket into the rack of an empty carriage that had a ticket, Dames Seules, gummed on the window. She got into the train and handed him twenty centimes.

“What’s this?” shouted the man, glaring at the money and then at her, holding it up to his nose, sniffing at it as though he had never in his life seen, much less held, such a sum.

“It’s a franc. You know that, don’t you? It’s a franc. That’s my fare!” A franc! Did he imagine that she was going to give him a franc for playing a trick like that just because she was a girl and travelling alone at night? Never, never! She squeezed her purse in her hand and simply did not see him – she looked at a view of St. Malo on the wall opposite and simply did not hear him.

“Ah, no. Ah, no. Four sous. You make a mistake. Here, take it. It’s a franc I want.” He leapt on to the step of the train and threw the money on to her lap. Trembling with terror she screwed herself tight, tight, and put out an icy hand and took the money – stowed it away in her hand.

“That’s all you’re going to get,” she said. For a minute or two she felt his sharp eyes pricking her all over, while he nodded slowly, pulling down his mouth: “Ve-ry well. Trrrès bien.” He shrugged his shoulders and disappeared into the dark. Oh, the relief! How simply terrible that had been! As she stood up to feel if the dress-basket was firm she caught sight of herself in the mirror, quite white, with big round eyes. She untied her “motor veil” and unbuttoned her green cape. “But it’s all over now,” she said to the mirror face, feeling in some way that it was more frightened than she.

People began to assemble on the platform. They stood together in little groups talking; a strange light from the station lamps painted their faces almost green. A little boy in red clattered up with a huge tea-wagon and leaned against it, whistling and flicking his boots with a serviette. A woman in a black alpaca apron pushed a barrow with pillows for hire. Dreamy and vacant she looked – like a woman wheeling a perambulator – up and down, up and down – with a sleeping baby inside it. Wreaths of white smoke floated up from somewhere and hung below the roof like misty vines.

“How strange it all is,” thought the little governess, “and the middle of the night, too.” She looked out from her safe corner, frightened no longer but proud that she had not given that franc. “I can look after myself – of course I can. The great thing is not to – ”

Suddenly, from the corridor, there came a stamping of feet and men’s voices, high and broken with snatches of loud laughter. They were coming her way. The little governess shrank into her corner as four young men in bowler hats passed, staring through the door and window. One of them, bursting with the joke, pointed to the notice Dames Seules and the four bent down the better to see the one little girl in the corner. Oh dear, they were in the carriage next door. She heard them tramping about, and then a sudden hush followed by a tall thin fellow with a tiny black moustache who flung her door open.

“If mademoiselle cares to come in with us,” he said, in French. She saw the others crowding behind him, peeping under his arm and over his shoulder, and she sat very straight and still. “If mademoiselle will do us the honour,” mocked the tall man. One of them could be quiet no longer; his laughter went off in a loud crack. “Mademoiselle is serious,” persisted the young man, bowing and grimacing. He took off his hat with a flourish, and she was alone again.

“En voiture. En voi-ture!” Someone ran up and down beside the train. “I wish it wasn’t night-time. I wish there was another woman in the carriage. I’m frightened of the men next door.” The little governess looked out to see her porter coming back again – the same man making for her carriage with his arms full of luggage. But – but what was he doing? He put his thumbnail under the label Dames Seules and tore it right off, and then stood aside squinting at her while an old man wrapped in a plaid cape climbed up the high step.

“But this is a Ladies’ compartment.”

“Oh no, Mademoiselle, you make a mistake. No, no I assure you. Merci, Monsieur.”

“En voi-turre!” A shrill whistle. The porter stepped off triumphant and the train started. For a moment or two, big tears brimmed her eyes and through them she saw the old man unwinding a scarf from his neck and untying the flaps of his Jaeger cap. He looked very old. Ninety at least. He had a white moustache and big gold-rimmed spectacles with little blue eyes behind them and pink wrinkled cheeks. A nice face – and charming the way he bent forward and said in halting French: “Do I disturb you, Mademoiselle? Would you rather I took all these things out of the rack and found another carriage?” What! that old man have to move all those heavy things just because she…

“No, it’s quite all right. You don’t disturb me at all.”

“Ah, a thousand thanks.” He sat down opposite her and unbuttoned the cape of his enormous coat and flung it off his shoulders.

The train seemed glad to have left the station. With a long leap it sprang into the dark. She rubbed a place in the window with her glove but she could see nothing – just a tree outspread like a black fan or a scatter of lights, or the line of a hill, solemn and huge. In the carriage next door the young men started singing “Un, deux, trois...” They sang the same song over and over at the tops of their voices.

“I never could have dared to go to sleep if I had been alone,” she decided. “I couldn’t have put my feet up or even taken off my hat.” The singing gave her a queer little tremble in her stomach and, hugging herself to stop it, with her arms crossed under her cape, she felt really glad to have the old man in the carriage with her. Careful to see that he was not looking she peeped at him through her long lashes. He sat extremely upright, the chest thrown out, the chin well in, knees pressed together, reading a German paper. That was why he spoke French so funnily. He was a German. Something in the army, she supposed – a Colonel or a General – once, of course, not now; he was too old for that now. How spick and span he looked for an old man. He wore a pearl pin stuck in his black tie and a ring with a dark red stone on his little finger; the tip of a white silk handkerchief showed in the pocket of his double-breasted jacket. Somehow, altogether, he was really nice to look at. Most old men were so horrid. She couldn’t bear them doddery – or they had a disgusting cough or something. But not having a beard – that made all the difference – and then his cheeks were so pink and his moustache so very white.

Down went the German paper and the old man leaned forward with the same delightful courtesy: “Do you speak German, Mademoiselle?”

“Ja, ein wenig, mehr als Franzosisch,” said the little governess, blushing a deep pink colour that spread slowly over her cheeks and made her blue eyes look almost black.

“Ach, so!” The old man bowed graciously. “Then perhaps you would care to look at some illustrated papers.” He slipped a rubber band from a little roll of them and handed them across.

“Thank you very much.” She was very fond of looking at pictures, but first she would take off her hat and gloves. So she stood up, unpinned the brown straw and put it neatly in the rack beside the dress-basket, stripped off her brown kid gloves, paired them in a tight roll and put them in the crown of the hat for safety, and then sat down again, more comfortably this time, her feet crossed, the papers on her lap. How kindly the old man in the corner watched her bare little hand turning over the big white pages, watched her lips moving as she pronounced the long words to herself, rested upon her hair that fairly blazed under the light. Alas! how tragic for a little governess to possess hair that made one think of tangerines and marigolds, of apricots and tortoiseshell cats and champagne! Perhaps that was what the old man was thinking as he gazed and gazed, and that not even the dark ugly clothes could disguise her soft beauty. Perhaps the flush that licked his cheeks and lips was a flush of rage that anyone so young and tender should have to travel alone and unprotected through the night. Who knows he was not murmuring in his sentimental German fashion: “Ja, es ist eine Tragoedie! Would to God I were the child’s grandpapa!”

“Thank you very much. They were very interesting.” She smiled prettily handing back the papers.

“But you speak German extremely well,” said the old man. “You have been in Germany before, of course?”

“Oh no, this is the first time” – a little pause, then – “this is the first time that I have ever been abroad at all.”

“Really! I am surprised. You gave me the impression, if I may say so, that you were accustomed to travelling.”

“Oh, well – I have been about a good deal in England, and to Scotland, once.”

“So. I myself have been in England once, but I could not learn English.”

He raised one hand and shook his head, laughing. “No, it was too difficult for me… ‘Ow-do-you-do. Please vich is ze vay to Leicestaire Squaare.’”

She laughed too. “Foreigners always say…” They had quite a little talk about it.

“But you will like Munich,” said the old man. “Munich is a wonderful city. Museums, pictures, galleries, fine buildings and shops, concerts, theatres, restaurants – all are in Munich. I have travelled all over Europe many, many times in my life, but it is always to Munich that I return. You will enjoy yourself there.”

“I am not going to stay in Munich,” said the little governess, and she added shyly, “I am going to a post as governess to a doctor’s family in Augsburg.”

“Ah, that was it.” Augsburg he knew; Augsburg – well – was not beautiful. A solid manufacturing town. But if Germany was new to her he hoped she would find something interesting there too.

“I am sure I shall.”

“But what a pity not to see Munich before you go. You ought to take a little holiday on your way” – he smiled – “and store up some pleasant memories.”

“I am afraid I could not do that,” said the little governess, shaking her head, suddenly important and serious. “And also, if one is alone…”

He quite understood. He bowed, serious too. They were silent after that. The train shattered on, baring its dark, flaming breast to the hills and to the valleys. It was warm in the carriage. She seemed to lean against the dark rushing and to be carried away and away. Little sounds made themselves heard; steps in the corridor, doors opening and shutting – a murmur of voices – whistling… Then the window was pricked with long needles of rain… But it did not matter… it was outside… and she had her umbrella… she pouted, sighed, opened and shut her hands once and fell fast asleep.

***

“Pardon! Pardon!” The sliding back of the carriage door woke her with a start. What had happened? Someone had come in and gone out again. The old man sat in his corner, more upright than ever, his hands in the pockets of his coat, frowning heavily.

“Ha! ha! ha!” came from the carriage next door. Still half asleep, she put her hands to her hair to make sure it wasn’t a dream.

“Disgraceful!” muttered the old man more to himself than to her. “Common, vulgar fellows! I am afraid they disturbed you, gracious Fräulein, blundering in here like that.”