Gender and sexuality

‘Re-reading Wide Sargasso Sea now in this, the fiftieth anniversary year of its first publication in 1966, I can’t help feeling that the novel remains just as groundbreaking and heartbreaking. Perhaps we are finally catching up with Jean Rhys and celebrating – with her, despite her – the unequivocal achievement of Wide Sargasso Sea.’

‘Already a substantial Eliot arts industry exists, ranging from academe to television, and now appear yet more books on this fascinating Victorian subject, both acts of hommage. Two very different women, journalist Rebecca Mead and academic/novelist Patricia Duncker, united by their enthusiasm for Eliot’s writing, engage with the giantess of Victorian letters. They follow in a tradition of Eliot readers, whose involvement in the texts created a broad church of worshipping fandom, something apparent in her lifetime.’

After publishing five or six of these books, I realised they had something in common. Yes they were all written by women – yes they were all written in the first person – and like practically all books and films of their time, they included writing about sex. (Since these first-person narratives were written by women, this necessarily meant that the books included narrative first-person writing about sex by a woman, a fact that tended to obscure practically everything else, but more on this later.)

Australia’s first female Prime Minister is the figure at the centre of this pile of books, and they were all produced during the last few months of her Prime Ministership. They came out in quick succession… all of them had gone to press before the afternoon of June 26 when Prime Minister Julia Gillard called the leadership spill that saw the federal ALP caucus vote her out of office in favour of Kevin Rudd.

The most important question was posed by Marguerite of Navarre, in the 1540s. She posed it, perhaps, at her favorite thermal spa, Cauterets, in the Pyrenees south of Lourdes. It was, ‘Can a woman know true love and retain her virtue?’ Marguerite was a the sister of François I of France, and the wife of the King of Navarre, a much younger man. She was a poet, a reformist and an intellectual.