Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - From Eve to Austen: Women in Literature

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Why might a woman have willingly confined herself to a cell for the rest of her life? Why have so many female authors in history published under aliases or initials? And what was Jane Austen’s dirtiest joke?In this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, Kate is joined by Anna Beer to discuss an alternative history of English literature. What prevented women from publishing their work, and how did they get around this?Produced by Sophie Gee. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Senior producer: Charlotte Long.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, this is a podcast of an adult nature that talks about adult things, an adulty way, with two adults talking to one another in an adult-like way. To you, who should be an adult,

and if you're not an adult, if you've stayed up late to try and sneak a listen to Betwixt the sheets, naughty, naughty, naughty, turn it off right back now and go and watch the wumbles. And as for anybody else who's still here, I am ready if you are. Let's do this. I am a woman who writes. I write books. I write articles. I write rude things on the inside stalls of toilets. That's not true. That's just the books and the articles. But being a woman who writes is a luxury that is relatively recent in our history. If you go back just a hundred years, it was a lot less common for women to be writing. And if you go back 100 before,

that, it's getting really unlikely that a woman would be able to make it as a writer. And I know what you're thinking, Jane Austen, George Elliott, and we can all pull names out of the bag, but the simple truth is these were the exception rather than the rule. It was just a lot harder for women to be authors than men. So how do you do it? If you're 200 years ago, you've got a burning book inside you and you need to get it out, how are you going to do that? Well, today, Bertwixter sheets, we are going to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. How might a woman make her writing more acceptable? Asking for a friend. The friend is me. Seriously, how do I make my writing more acceptable?

Oh, do you know what? I'm just going to steer into the skid. My writing is never going to be acceptable, and I'm okay with that. But this is a luxury that my predecessors never had. How do you write books if you're a woman? Do you need the support of men? Do you need the support of the establishment, the church? What if you just don't write about anything scandalous or salacious at all? That's me out for a start. But from the Bible to Jane Austen, today I'm talking to Anna Beer about the history of women writers and the obstacles that have stood in their way and how they bypass them. Let's do this. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. I'm only speaking to Anna Beer. How are you?

I'm very well, thank you. I'm really excited to be talking to you because we're talking, we're going to talk about all kinds of stuff, but primarily your book, Eve Bites Back, an alternative history of English literary. Yeah, the biting is quite important. I like that. Now, what was it that made you want to write an alternative history of English literature? What was the aha moment? Was there an aha moment? I think there was quite a few aha moments and it took me quite a long time to pluck up the courage to put them all together into one huge, aha, I'm going to do this. It's amazing what a pandemic can do because you just realize you have nothing to lose. Oh, this is a pandemic baby. It absolutely is pandemic baby, yes. But also,

So I think I'd wanted to write a book about an amazing woman. She appears in Eiff, like that. She just got one little chapter. I wanted to write a whole book about her, and I was fascinated with her. And then I was sidetracked by writing this book about somebody called Shakespeare. And as I was writing my book about Shakespeare and putting in all this stuff about gender and sexuality and, oh, goodness, Shakespeare was a man. I suddenly thought, I'd come back to the old material. And then I realized it wasn't enough to do one woman.

I wanted to do 500 years of women not exactly fighting back, because some of them don't quite manage to. but working out what they're trying to do and how they did it. Who was the woman that made you think, I want to write this book, but actually I have to write more about more women? So Emilia Lanya was the daughter of an Italian immigrant family of musicians who came over in the time of Henry VIII. So she was born at Emilia Bassano and her family of some northern Italy. That's a nice name.

It is a nice name. And from the Veneto, so she's from a world in which courtisans were a natural part of culture. and she's from musicians family. And later in her life, she's a very English mistress. And I'd never thought, I wonder if that northern Italian Venetian background meant that she kind of got the idea of making it work for her in a very, very English setting to become the mistress of a wealthy, powerful man

and perhaps get the education and skills that courtisans often did through their sex work. Well, they did. It's really complicated trying to explain what the cortisant is and what the cortisans does. There's so many different types of sex work, obviously. But they were very educated. They were celebrities, some of them in their own rights. And I'd never made that connection either.

If so, and it would be a bit of a leap, it didn't work out particularly well for her. Go on what happened? Her chap, her wealthy, incredibly wealthy cousin of the queen chap, head of the whole theatre establishment in England at the time, she got pregnant by him. And then she got married, but of course not to her immensely well.

She was married off to another musician, which is how things worked. But that was end of, because, you know, he wasn't really going to step up, was he? No. What was it? Marilyn sang, that's when those lasses go back to their spouses, honestly. So your book is about the history of women writing or trying to write, I think is probably a better way of putting it, because historically, at least, it has been quite hostile to women writers, hasn't it? The old publishing industry. Yes. Why was that? I'm going to be very, very academic here and picky about your word publishing because one of the things when you write a book about 500 years of history is that you realise that publishing and the problem with print takes different forms as the centuries go by.

So if you're looking at a medieval nun, you know, she's not going to be publishing in any conventional sense that we understand now. If you look at a 19th century novelist, they are. But what's interesting is however you get your work out there, you know, whether it's on a vellum or whether it's in a pulp fiction serial in the middle of the 19th century, or even now on Twitter, there's this link between you're putting your work out there, you're putting yourself out there, you become a target. And that's carried right through 500, 600 years. So it doesn't actually matter what medium you're working in.

It's that venture into the public arena. It's having your voice heard. It's saying, I've got something to say, which then makes you a target and makes people kind of push back and say get back in your box. That's hugely simplistic, but that's the challenge that every woman from the 14th century

to 19 century have to find. First of all, how do I get to the starting line? The starting line of the race to be a writer. How do I get the education? How do I get the money? How do I get the bits of paper?

How do I get the bits of paper to even begin being a writer? But then how do I get my work out there without it just being slapped down, let alone finish the race and be read now? Yes. I mean, that's absolutely right, isn't it?

Writing and publishing it and getting it out there and people reading it are all ultimately different stages, aren't they? One of the things that's very difficult about any writer, but particularly for women, is that you have to put yourself out there. You're effectively selling a part of yourself whilst writing. Is there a link there? Is that maybe why there's been historically shame attached? Women aren't supposed to do it. Almost that same stigma around sex work and being an actress or anything that puts you out there. I wouldn't even put an almost.

I think it's a direct link that is made explicitly by some generations. I can give you quotations. This is about late 17th century. So we're in the restoration era. You know, Nell, Gwynne, Charles II shagging his way through the monarchy, all the rest of it. It's a libertine era. And you'd think, great, you know, women got a chance to behave badly and not be condemned for it. But if you're a female playwright, like Afroben, I've written here, and I'm going to quote,

17th century society's equation of playwriting with prostitution was simple and horribly effective. A woman who made herself public by having a play produced or published was the same as a woman who made herself public by selling her body. The anxieties that simmered around the publication of, say, poetry earlier in the century. So 60 years earlier, somebody who published their poetry, like Amelia Lanya, was condemned because she was entering an arena that she wasn't supposed to be. and she was making herself public again. The anxiety is a similar around publication of, say, poetry, early in the century, became explosive when applied to drama by its end. And then they run like a seam through the century and beyond.

And one of the reasons why Jane Austen published as A Lady. She wasn't going to put her name anywhere near one of her published novels. That's fascinating. I'm absolutely intrigued by that. That's just links I hadn't even thought of before, Jane Austen on the game. by writing books. That's a missing novel somewhere. I haven't even told you about her jokes about anal sex when she was a teenager. Oh my fucking God, what? Just stop everything.

Jane Austen made an anal sex joke. Yes, she did. And what's better about it is that she writes it for her little family world. Oh, Jane. They're passing it around the parsonage, as it were, and it's not a great joke. But it was accepted. It was seen as funny. She was teenager. By the time she becomes a published novelist, even one who's publishing anonymously, what's really interesting, she gives that joke to one of her female characters, one of her feistyest, but also most immoral female characters, the gorgeous Mary Crawford.

But Mary Crawford is a bad woman. And so Jane Austen, the author, gives her own joke to a bad character. And what haunts me is, is she in control of that as a writer? Is she thinking, this is the price I have to pay to be published? or has she changed and realised, you know, it is terrible to make jokes about anal sex. What was the joke? I'll have to look that one up. As I said, it's not a very good joke.

It involves the Navy, Rears and Admirals. She does like a sailor and her brothers went to the Navy and all that. So she's probably heard all this stuff at home. She's making Aria's jokes. Yes, she is. And evolving the Navy as well. That is incredible. Now that is an adaptation I would like to see.

Right. Who is the earliest woman writer? I mean, is this biblical? Ah, now, there have been supposed lost Gospels written by women, haven't there? Yes. And when I began writing this book, I was a bit of a numpty and I thought, oh, I'm going to find all sorts of interesting things, hidden manuscripts. The book opens with me realizing that I'm an idiot because I got all excited about the book of Esther. And it's a book of the Gospels that hasn't got into the standard biblical canon. And I thought, oh, Book of Esther. Esther's an author. And no, it's a book of. about Esther. And it's a really sort of slightly strange Cinderella story as well. And I think there's a

very strong argument that though we're still living with the legacy of the Christian and the Jewish religious texts, the book is called Eve Bites Back. I didn't want to try to go back to recover some kind of authentic female voice from millennia ago. I'm not equipped to do it. I'm not even sure we can. And there are lots of much cleverer people than me who've gone, for example, to particularly the Christian passion story of Christ and looked at the character of Mary Magdalene, who is as important in this book as Eve is, and try to rehabilitate her, try to make her one of Christ's disciples, which is a really convincing take on Mary Magdalene. She's the 13th disciple. But then we kind of can't quite cope that she might also have been a sex workup, maybe. The Bible doesn't say so,

but she's a space on which we project all our fantasies and fears about women. And Mary Madeline carries all that. A really wonderful analyser of these biblical texts said, yeah, we're all trying to go back to Mary Magdalene and turn her into something that looks and walks and sounds like us as 21st century feminists. And actually, there are five words, the woman who was a sinner. That's all that's in the Bible. And on that, we've built this whole thing. You know, we even want to marry her off to Jesus. We don't need a married Jesus and we don't need a married Mary Magdalene. They can be interesting in their own rights. So she's in the book, very much so. And I think Anna Fisk says, you know, we're trying to put together broken monuments anyway. Whenever we go back to the Bible, we're trying to make something

out of something that's very, very broken. Fragments about women's lives, a women's experience. And that's why I wanted to look, how do we deal? How does each generation deal with that legacy? There are these very powerful myths about if you are born, female, and live as a woman, what you can can't do. And so many of those myths are derived from the Bible, but every generation has a different take on what that actually means in practice. I'll be back with Anna after this short break. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the Middle Ages. So many of these travellers who went out looking for press to John, what did they think they were hearing?

We explore cutting-edge research. Genetic signatures found in present-day Jewish populations were shared by the genetic ancestries we found. From everyday life to dynasty-shattering events. It's a time when all the major Viking raids have started, which as Christians they think of as vengeance from heaven. and reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles. I stand up straight in a bed. I'm hairy at my base, and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion.

I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. Every Tuesday on Saturday will explore some of the biggest stories, the greatest mysteries, and latest research. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're talking about women writers being allied to, you're selling your body, you're selling sex. It's got that level of stigma, and maybe not like absolutely openly, but certainly implicitly, that you're doing something wrong. How did women write anything at all? How did they get round that? Did they just like preface everything by like,

I'm not a massive slag? Please listen to my story. I think pretty much, yes. I think the defensiveness. I mean, I end with a quote or one of the quotes from Doctor Who when Doctor Who was first a woman saying, you know, I was spending all this time defending myself. I just want to get on with the job. So I can absolutely run down a list of eight ways.

that individual women from the 15th century to the 19th century kind of got around that. I mean, some that went straight through it like a juggernaut, just, I'm not going to bother with any of this. But on the whole, they navigated and negotiated and sometimes signed up for it completely because there's one way to signal that you're not a massive slag is to say, all the other women are, but not me. Oh, that's clever. Yes. And those were the most depressing chapters to write, I have to say. But you can also completely understand why somebody, and this still happens for women in politics and in positions of power now, they have to set themselves apart from other women because otherwise they'd be tainted by all the stupid things that are said

about women, their bodies and their desires, their irrationality. So this is the kind of idea of like someone would write under the kind of mantle of, look, I'm not like other girls. Absolutely. I will run through my eight examples. So going back to the 14th century, you've got two women, First women whose works have survived writing in English. And one of them goes for the extreme nun approach. I mean, that is wearing the T-shirt. I'm not a slag. I'm going to not only be a nun.

I'm not going to have sex, but I'm going to be locked, blocked inside a room with no door with only two windows, one of which I can get my food in, one of which I can take my waist out. And I'll be so secluded from the world that I will not be contaminated by the world. But it worked. because in that space, and I love this about this, she was an anchoress, Julian of Norwich, this is, walled into her cell where she would die, and as an anchoress, you had to do work.

You had to make yourself useful, again, something that women are encouraged to do, needlework, something like that. In the list of things that anchoress were encouraged to do as work was writing. And I love that idea that it's manual work, which it is in the medieval era. And so she does her manual work of her labour of writing, and she writes this stunning, stunning work, which kind of explicitly and implicitly says that her God is both male and female, masculine and feminine. She actually uses she to describe the divine. And, you know, she's doing all this from her walled in cell. So she's unpolluted. She's a good girl, yes. But from that safe space, she can launch her revolutionary view. The second version, completely different, slightly younger than Julian,

is Marjorie Kemp. So she has like 400 kids. She's married. She's desperately unhappy. And she does a deal with her husband because she's had a vision from Jesus and Jesus loves her. Jesus really, really loves her. If I remember my Marjorie Kemp, she was quite adamant about that. Yes, quite explicit as well. And she gets from Jesus what she never got from her husband. Oh, I bet she did. Yes, she did because it's all in her head in a good way. And back to the point, I'm still thinking of Fantasizing about Jesus, or was it fantasy? Maybe he did come and sit on the end of her bed and make her feel really, really good.

But that's what she says. Anyway, she goes to her husband and she says, darling, I want a celibate marriage. So no more sex with you. Certainly no more babies. I want a celibate marriage and I'm now married to Jesus. And he says... Holy fuck, right.

Yeah, well, lovely thing about him, Mr. Kemp, is that he says, great, let's going to have a pie and a pint. And I think, hero! She was extremely annoying, though, Marjorie Kemp. And didn't she get kicked off a pilgrimage? because she was being so annoying. Yeah, everybody hates her. Everybody hates you, Marjorie.

Probably when she announced this to her husband, it was probably like, great. Yeah, I hear relief about pie and pine. But at the same time, she got what she was aiming for, and she gets her free pass to go and travel and go on all these amazing pilgrimages. I mean, years and years of travel, and then somehow, in collaboration with some nice friendly monks,

she gets her story out there. So two different ways of dealing with the fact that I'm not like other women, I'm going to do things differently. And Marjorie gave precisely no fucks. I mean, that's what allowed her to do that. So, yeah, she was there. Amelia Lanya, we've already talked about.

She's actually the most mysterious woman in the books. We don't know how she got the education she got, which is why the courtesan idea is just so amazing. But she was a daughter, a courtisan, if we want to call that a mistress, a wife, a mother. She fulfilled all those roles that are conventional for women, but she hits 40. And suddenly, out of nowhere, she writes.

writes the first original volume of poetry in English. Because until that point, people have been translating poetry, translating the Psalms. She writes it. And if anybody who's listening picks up one poem, don't be put off by the 17th century words, just read little bits of it. And oh, my goodness, she is amazing. But I think age matters. When you reach 40 in that age, distant memory, in my case,

but you know, you've kind of done the things you're supposed to do as a woman on this planet. So it's almost like you've got to hit menopause. And now you can write. Now you can write, yeah. And I kept on hitting this age 40. Let's hope, ladies. Now we get to the slightly more complicated people navigating this thing. By the way, every single one of the women I've mentioned so far

spend a lot of ink defending their right to write. It's interesting, but you kind of wish they didn't have to. And then I mentioned Afra Ben earlier, running with the lads in Libertine, London in the late 17th century. And she just fights back. I mean, the 1980s all over again. It's lad culture. And she really, really tries to give as good as she gets.

She keeps fighting. In the end, it's just too easy to attack her. You know, she can't actually erase the fact of her sex and gender and that she writes for a living. And there's nothing she can do. And she tries. And she also does a bit of victim blaming, which I find tricky in her plays. She's kind of got this thing, and I have come across this. And I've got a horrible feeling I might have been guilty of it myself back when I

I was very young, which is thinking that clever women don't get raped, that, you know, her heroines talk their way out of... Like sort of the modern equivalent of if you're drunk, you're kind of asking for it. Yeah. Or that you wouldn't put yourself in that position, would you? So this all seems to be about, like, trying to position yourself ultimately as part of the patriarchy. So you've got either pretend you're a virgin and Uber Virgin or, you know, become the Uber

virgin yourself and lock yourself in a wall. Or you can become quite judgy and slag off other women. but kind of embodying this mother-wife, the sort of the super-conservative thing. Then you've got this one that you talk about, which seems more like lads, lads, lads, like you kind of steer into the skids. Like, may as well just go with it. Yeah, it takes you a long way that, if you've got the balls to do it, as it were, but you're always in the end run up against the brick wall of your society's belief

about what women essentially are. So the last three women in the book have got three completely different attitudes, takes on marriage. So we've got Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who is as a little, as you can possibly imagine. And she's got a really clever way of making her marriage work for her, which is living in a different country.

Oh, that's clever. It's just brilliant, isn't it? Yeah. But the point is, people look at that and say, oh, how sad. And I'm thinking, no girl, they write letters to each other. They co-parents.

He sends her money. We're done. Exactly. And they're kind of loyal to each other in a very unsexy view of marriage. It's only the 19th century that started thinking that marriage had to have anything to do with love.

So it works for her. still gives her time to have an outrageous and possibly unhappy attempt to have an affair with a man who was more interested in her male friend. So making marriage, as it were, working for her, but not in the sense of coming home and cooking his tea. And she writes every day of her life. She absolutely loves it. Jane Austen, as we all know, did not marry. And that becomes like this defining feature of the female author as time goes on. You've got to make your choice, ladies. Do you want a conventional, normal family life with a lovely man and babies, or do you want to be a creative? That narrative is still in force, isn't it?

Like when you look at women in careers, the idea of the career woman not marrying and never having babies, that's still very much with us. So Austin does not marry, and I think that's much less important, actually, than the fact that, as we were discussing earlier, She does this transformation from the teenage Jane, very edgy, very satirical, very funny to this much more respectable middle age Jane. And partly the problem is we're back to it again, that she's getting her work out there. She wants to be published. She wants to earn money. And she's getting paid for something that she's creating. And the biggest problem is the novel.

And this was news to me. I thought novels, novels, what can be wrong with novels? But novels give you pleasure. Oh, Jane, you big tart. Yes. Yes. And even if Jane's novels don't give us pleasure, there are plenty of other novelists, particularly women, lining up to give us a lot of pleasure with their fiction. It's a lovely anecdote that I recount in the book about 11-year-old boys stealing a novel from his parents. They've been talking about it. And he devours it and loves it. And it involves killing a cat and doing all sorts of horrible things. But the really shocking thing is, it's not the death of the cat. It's that an 11-year-old boy is reading a novel and it'll corrupt him. Because apparently it did all. sorts of things to your sensitive bits. And I use that term technically. So Jane Austen has got to say, I'm not like that. I'm not writing the kind of novel that will overstimulate you.

I'm writing the kind of novel in which my characters marry and move into a parsonage. Yes. I once read a review of Pride and Prejudice on Amazon. It's just a bunch of people going to each other's houses. The reason I've started is that. It's because I adore Jane Austen. I've grown up with Jane Austen. I was fixated on Darcy for half an hour. But yeah, it's all about calming us and showing us the power of reason, which is, of course, masculine or troped masculine in our world. So Jane Austen is running with the boys in a completely different way to the Afroben, Libertine, I'm going to shag everything that moves, approach, but she's still impersonating being a male writer. Yeah. Or at least behaving herself and not upsetting anything. Yes,

behaving. Good behaviour, full marks. My final author, who, there was one reviewer who said, clearly I've got a huge thing about this woman. Actually, I do because she is awesome. Her personal life became the subject of intense scrutiny. In the hope people will read the book, I'm not going to say what she did and who she did it with and why she did it. But it worked for her. But the abuse she received.

And if you just line up your average 19th century male fiction writers, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins. Absolutely scallywags. Yes, scallywags and worse, I can tell you. A lot of women as collateral. damage for those men's life. And as far as I know, Mary Braddon, my last woman, shouldn't actively hurt any men. Okay. So what was her technique then? How did she manage to get around this and be a writer? Was she menopausal? Was she a virgin? Did she lock herself in a wall? Did she?

No, she was worse. She was an actress. Oh, Jesus. So she had absolutely nothing to lose. She knew the dynamic from being an actress. I literally mean that. She understood what it is to be effective in an industry. And she just then applied that to pulp fiction. So she began as a Pulp Fiction writer. But her early work, she wanted to be published with initials only, M.E. Braddon. And there was a moment when she became so famous that she was outed as Mary Elizabeth Braddon. And that is when the trouble started. And she was devastated.

She did not want to have her work, which she was intensely proud of, to impact her family life. And she knew that it would as soon as people joined the two. So M.E. Braden, she tries it that way. Jane Austen publishes as a lady. Afra Ben published often just saying she was a man. But in the end, they'll get you. Okay, so there's a number of tactics that you can utilise. How does this work when you've got the Gothic horror writers?

Because they weren't behaving themselves. That's a really good question. And in a sense, I could have chosen writers who were much more openly revolutionary in their lifestyle choices. And in the end, if I'd been able to come to the 20th century, I'd love to write about a writer called Juna Barnes, who wrote a novel called Nightwood, published in 1922, same year as Wasteland. And it's, Juna Barnes is, for example, an American writer escapes a very oppressive childhood, an upbringing, comes to Paris, and lives an amazing, complicated, rich. And in the end, utterly blighted by alcoholism life.

But she did the work, and it got out there. So I wonder if that's me being a bit cautious. I wanted to show how you can work within the system. But even then if you're talking about writers that are like operating outside of the system, they're still situated against the system. You know, they're playing with it. In my PhD, I looked at 19th century women writers. And it was one of those things that like you spend ages researching it

and then it just never makes it into the final cut. But it was researching the concept of the authoress, which sort of exploded around about the 1830s. And I was looking at it at, no one never knows it at Abelability. Lisa Elizabeth Landon, who published under the initials L-E-L. And she, just for a while, she was like this utter huge celebrity writer. And then she died under mysterious circumstances, possibly poisoned by her husband. We're not quite sure. It's very weird.

But her work was admired and mocked at the same time because it was uber emotional. That was her raison d'etre. Always about love and it was always about heartbreak. And it was always about, oh, God, I'm such a woman with my womanly feelings in my womanly brain. and I'm writing my womanly things. Have you seen that in the history of women writing? They're kind of, oh my God, I'm just like so emotional. Yeah, well, we were talking about Julian of Norwich and Marjorie Kemp.

And Marjorie Kemp does that a lot. You know, I am special because I'm a woman. I have special emotional powers. Yeah, you can run with that in lots of different ways. The danger is that it kind of gets neutered from time to time. So that passion has often had to be channeled into good. I don't know whether your lady,

all her emotion, was in order to improve the people around her, which is the other big pressure on women. If you're going to write, it's got to do good moral work. It's got to improve the people around you, whether those be your children or your men or what have you. So all that emotion might be useful,

but it has to have a purpose. There was also a sense with this 19th century woman writer that she couldn't stop doing it. Once that's in there now, she's just this melting ball of emotional, turmoil and heartbreak. And that's somewhere that Marjorie Kemp must have been quite annoying because now she can't stop doing this, like, oh my God, I'm so emotional thing.

This other writer did that as well. And it was like, how'd you take a break from that? Like if Marjorie Kemp just wanted to write a limerick or something or just, you know, try some new material out, I don't know if she'd have been allowed to do it. She has to keep up this uber emotional facade. Yeah, once you've got your persona, it's hard to ditch it. But I was just thinking about some of the later writers

and dealing with that legacy of the crazy woman. And I don't want to go all mad woman in the attic on this, but they're dealing with this specter of the creative woman as slightly unhinged, and therefore you've got to, again, rein in, show that you're being rational and controlled. But one of the reasons I love Mary Elizabeth Braddon is because there's an energy to her and her writing and the way she just lived her life.

She keeps at it. She's actually very brave, very courageous. But there's a kind of honesty as well. It's just saying, know what I'm here on this planet to do. I'm going to do it. And she has a kind of clear-sightedness about herself and about how women in general understood or individual women and those emotions that you've just been talking about. And there's this wonderful moment where she writes herself into her books in a character who is born Sam Smith, but changes his name when he becomes

a novelist to Sigismund Smith. And then when it gets posh, he calls himself Sigismund smive. So, She's taking the Mick out of herself. And this character starts going to literary parties. And people come up to you and say, oh, I love your work. It's so passionate, so dark, it's so mysterious. And the bloke is just very ordinary. And I think this is how Mary Elizabeth saw herself.

I'm an ordinary person who is writing extraordinary things. And it's this expectation that a woman who writes about sex has got to be having a lot of sex. It's this utter collapsing of the work and the woman, which I just don't think we do. quite as much with men? No, I think that that's probably true. I mean, being someone that writes about sex,

I can certainly relate to the fact that people make assumptions about you, and then they think that you want to talk to them about, that happened. And he used to rationalise it to myself. I was like, well, people probably ask Mary Berry about cake recipes. But yeah, we do have this kind of, the public informs the private when it comes to women authors. Yeah, as if women don't have, and that's because we're less rational creatures,

the ability to say, I get to take this experience or these ideas, what have you, and form them into this literary work. It's like as if we go vomit out our personal experiences onto the page. Now, that is a huge crass generalisation, but I think that is still at work still somehow. Do you think that these tropes that you've identified throughout your book of how women kind of get around this idea that they shouldn't be writing, ranging from absolutely distance yourself for many suggestions,

it's about sex by walling yourself into a nunnery. interesting. Be menopausal, don't get married. Make it about God seems to be quite a popular one as well. Be completely insane because then you can't help yourself. Be one of the lads, lads, lads, lads. Just kind of embrace, yeah, I'm a massive slag. So I'm going to write books as well. That's just what I do. Are any of these things still in force today with women writers, do you think? I know you've looked at the history, but have we shaken this off? Have we escaped this? No. Don't think anyone's warring themselves into a nunnery to write a book. Some of us fantasize about it. I know that doesn't sound.

like a punishment. It's like, so I just get to sit in here and you bring me food. No Wi-Fi signal, I'm sure. And I just read stuff and sew. Oh my God. It actually reminds me of the great 16th century fear of the closet, the closet being a small room with a door. This is in a world which didn't tend to have doors. It tend to have corridors and open rooms. And so a woman would retire to her closet, which is, as I say, a room with a door for some privacy and she would read. And this is bad, of course, because you don't know what the woman might be doing. She might be overstimulating herself after all. And that goes through to the 19th century,

huge anxiety that you'll have come across, you know, of people worrying about women reading privately, women reading in bed. And that's why the symptoms on reading in groups and, you know, the father of the house reading the latest in Stormwater, have you, because it kept it social, kept it policed.

Private reading is always very dodgy. We do still lack ourselves in the closet to read, although we're mostly scrolling now. We're on TikTok and things. Now your question was not about that. So I'm going to just go back to what your question was. Is it happening now? I do think that equation of any woman who puts herself out there is asking for it is pretty powerful. I still think that this idea of women who openly seek authority and power, there's something wrong with them.

I still think that's got quite a lot of currency. It's the price you pay so you don't have the normal, quote-unquote, family life. But I'd love to say it is changing. And a lot of people say to me, oh, but it has changed because I'll walk into a bookshop and half the books by women. But as somebody who's worked in the field of history for a time, I remember I wrote a book about a dead white male who's absolutely awesome and fascinating, Sir Walter Rale. I, of course, being a completely vain neurotic woman, was looking at where I was on the list and everything. And I realised the top 20 history titles for months and months had won two female authors. And they've just started a new prize for female authors of nonfiction.

So the fact that we're still needing to say, hang on. It's all subconsciously done, isn't it? But there's just something that we do. And I think that women do this too, and you often have to unpack your own assumptions, is that when you see a man's name on a history book, it conveys a level of authority that Kate Lister just doesn't, which is an awful thing. I was actually very disappointed to know that you're interviewing me. Because...

Who's this silly cow? Yeah. There's been loads of studies about that as well, about what happens when you use a woman's name or this, that near that. This is all unconscious stuff that we do carry around. And the other thing as well is, you'll never, ever get it right. in the same way that women won't get it right. If you're married, then you're spending too much time away from your kids. If you're not, then you're missing out on having kids.

So many people have said a version of this. The version I'm giving comes from actually a composer in the 1920s. And she says, if Benjamin Britton, a male contemporary of hers, writes a bad score, they'll say he's written a bad score, he's had a bad day. If I do it, they'll say it's because I'm a woman. And again, it's that return to gender, that focus on gender, which is so real and so powerful that I don't want to say, as some people do, we shouldn't even be looking at the lives

because even to think about people's lives is to be sexist. And I get that completely. I'd love to be able to write a book that didn't refer to the sex or gender of my authors. But the fact is that their society's views about sex and gender informed every single day of their life and informed every word that they wrote and every word that we receive now. The lovely thing is,

and the thing that cheers me up when I'm getting depressed about this, is to hear these voices kind of shouting across the centuries. They're not necessarily feminist in any sense that you or I or 100 other different kinds of feminists we could line up in this room now might say, but they're asking the right questions, even if their answers are very different from the ones that we might come up with now. And that's what kept me going through writing the book. Otherwise, I'd just be really depressed.

I think that we could say that things are changing, slowly, changing for the better. Maybe my bar is extremely low because I'm just like, well, I didn't have to warn myself in a nunnery to write a book. I think things are getting better. And my own feeling, and this isn't just about gender, it might be about issues about trans people or discussions about race, is that when I wrote this book, Eve Bites Back,

I wrote a similar book about eight female composers and I wrote it in 2014-15. I never really thought about race in any meaningful way when I wrote that book six or seven years ago. And for this book, it was in the front of my book, mind because of the work of other people to make me open my eyes, open my ears and think again about my position and the assumptions that I'm making. So I don't think it is just about gender. There's another strategy. So you can transcend your world, as I say, the cell. You can move away from it.

You can withdraw. You might argue that Jane Austen withdrew to shorten to her cottage away from the world. You can escape. So that's the Marjorie Kemp approach, the Mary Wirtle-Lomontague, travel, you know, escape the values of your time. There's running with the boys, as you said. But there's another one which is collaboration. And yes, Marjorie Kemp is a nutter. But it actually says in the book, it's the book of Marjorie Kemp. And that leads some people to say she didn't write it.

But it's a record of collaboration between somebody, as the medieval words have it, could no letter. She can't actually form the letters herself. She can't write because that is the second hardest thing to do in literacy. But she was literate in a complete. different way of thinking about literacy. She heard her Bible. She heard the stories. She heard the mystery dramas, what have you. She knew these works of literature, but orally. And she talked about them then with the scribes with whom she worked. And without them, one of them was

called Alan. And I like that. Alan. Alan helped her. You just don't think of medieval people being called Alan. No, you don't. Alan was a good guy. And there's another one we don't even know his name, he's just a monk of salthouse, but he was her friend, and that's described in it. And there's an amazing book that came out a few months ago, but I've got a bit of envy of it. You see, if I'm compassionate with female of authors, Katie Hessels, the story of art, without men, such a great title. But if I was honest about my book, mine's the story of literature with men, is women, they need men to make things happen.

And whether it's Jane Austen's brothers or Marjorie Kemp's scribes, monks, whether it's, I know, your mates, whoever it is, they needed men to back them. And that, I think, is the thing I take forward with me today now. And I suppose it informs my particular kind of feminism. I don't want a kind of exclusionary world in which women are completely apart from men and somehow privileged in a slightly different way, because then we're back to just a kind of sex-based gender essentialist bollocks. I want to say, we are human. It's a very, very traditionalist view. And we have to work together, whether we're born. female or male, whether we live as men and women or trans, it doesn't matter. Just to get the work

out there, we have to support each other. Absolutely. And you've been amazing to talk to. You've been so much fun. And I'm just going to have to take a bit of time after this interview and just digest some of the things that you've told me today, because I didn't know these things. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me on very easy to find. They can find me on Twitter at Anna Rose Beer and on Instagram as Anna Beer author. but I still am slightly attached to an Oxford College, which is an amazing Oxford College, actually, which supports adult education and postgraduate non-traditional learners. So I'm going to plug it here. So find me at Kellogg College.

And if you can say that without sniggering, you'll be my friend. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been a treat. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Anna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcast. And if you have something that you'd like us to look into, if there is a burning subject that you just need us to be talking about, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. And we really do read them.

And to the listener who wrote in to say that I'm as nice as chocolate, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds. Thank you.