Jewels and bent corners

There are two classes of people: those who deliberately ruin their books by folding over the corners of pages, and those who don't. I am one of the corner-bending sinners of this world. I do it because, when I'm lying in bed reading, I often pass through a passage that strikes me as beautiful, true, relevant to me, or simply startling in some way - but I am of course far too lazy to get up and write it down. So I fold over the corner of the page and think that one day I'll return to the book, look at the folded-corner pages and be struck again by the power of those lines - assuming I can remember which point on the page I'd originally been struck by.

And the number of bent-cornered books in the bookcase and the wobbling stack by my bed gradually builds up, and the powerful passages remain unremarked and forgotten, apart from a kind of shadow-memory: there is something important there, something that would stop me from letting those books go to the book recycling bin - though something which, coincidentally, makes me more likely than ever to press them into a friend's hand with an intense look and the words 'but you really must read this book'. But today I finally have the time and peace to look again and see if what seemed so important one night remains so on a second look.

Maybe these important passages are so personal that they won't mean the same to another reader. In any case, I hope they are interesting, and that a little of their magic rubs off on you too.

 
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JEAN RHYS

I discovered Jean Rhys when we inherited some books from my late parents-in-law. I find it hard to resist slim volumes of fiction, as they fall pleasantly between the intensity of a short story and the daunting weight of a 500-pager, and there were seven old paperback volumes that called to me. I've gobbled up Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark and Quartet, and I find myself wanting to stop people and tell them how incredibly modern Jean Rhys's writing was, and that everyone should find time to revisit her works.

The cruelty of the world towards a woman on her own, with few resources and no true friend to support her, seems to be the main theme in Jean Rhys's work. She writes without sentimentality of the brutal decisions and squalid alternatives facing her protagonists. You suffer her characters' torments, but it's a cold, descriptive suffering. It's not the kind of sadness that weeps on a kind friend's shoulder. It's the kind that gets drunk, dulls itself with sleeping pills, walks in the rain with wet feet and shabby clothes, and heads towards destruction without self-pity.

'She thought again: people are very rum. With all their little arrangements, prisons and drains and things, tucked away where nobody can see.'

Jean Rhys, Quartet (chapter 7)

'Marya listened to the music of the pipe, dwindling away in the distance, persistent as the hope of happiness.'

(chapter 15)

'His eyes were very cautious. He was thinking that it wouldn't do to leave the girl trailing round Montparnasse looking as ill as that. She was lying huddled. As if there were a spring broken somewhere. He felt at once flattered, impatient and pitiful.'

(chapter 20)

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NAOMI ALDERMAN

I've only just begun reading Disobedience by Naomi Alderman, but the sentence below struck me as being very perceptive.

'So I offered to make some coffee, except I realized as he was accepting that I knew how he took his coffee and the idea of making it how I knew he liked it seemed so intensely personal that I thought I'd rather open a vein and bleed into the cup.'
Naomi Alderman, Disobedience (chapter 2)

When you get close to someone, the intimacy between the two of you is not just sexual; it pervades every part of life, from your partner's taste in coffee to their opinion on Laurel and Hardy movies, their views on sleeping with the windows open, their choice of junk DVDs. This knowledge is like the fruit in the Garden of Eden - once you know it, there's no going back. When a relationship ends or is torn apart, this shadow-knowledge persists for a surprisingly long time.

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MARILYN FRENCH

I discovered The Women's Room about a year ago. My Virago edition is plastered with quotes from famous women saying that this is a book that changes lives, an intense and wonderful experience, a shock. And yet I was suspicious at first. Perhaps partly because it's a giant book, well over 500 pages, and I always feel a little commitment-phobic about monster books at first, but also because, well, isn't it about, you know - feminism...? Somehow, feminism seems a subject to be apologised for, hushed up. No, no, we reassure each other, I'm not really a feminist, you know - not one of those comical bra-burners. I just want equality, that's all - I wouldn't call myself a feminist. Ho ho.

And the book was a bombshell and it was a revelation. First published in 1977, it plunges a twenty-first-century reader right into the suffocating climate of 1950s America, where women are sweet dollies and then good wives, with no choices and few rights. We suffer with teenage Mira, the protagonist, as she struggles to comprehend how her 'wild clamorous emotions' can fit into the 'tight, silent place' that is her home. And reading it, I relived my teenage years: 'Mira wondered if the insides of everybody were as tumultuous and explosive as hers.' It seems Marilyn French knew what was wrong with teenage me when I was still a baby.

'Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about what it is you are waiting for.' 

Marilyn French, The Women's Room (chapter 1, section 15)

Anyone who has languished in a hopeless job or relationship can identify with that sentiment.

'In a real life, how can you tell when you're in Book I of Book III, or Act II or Act V? No stagehands come charging on to haul down the curtain at an appropriate moment. So how do I know whether I'm living in the middle of Act III and heading toward a great climax, or at the end of Act V and finished?'

(chapter 3, section 2)

This is something else I often wondered about as a child. How would you know when it was time for the big dramas to cease and to begin living happily ever after? Would life's struggles really end when you'd met the right man? Would that be all there was? I decided, when I was a child, that I would write a book that simply contains life, moving on without a big build-up, a climax and a resolution, but ticking onwards from day to day, hour to hour. I haven't done it yet, and I realise it would probably be boring - but really, our lives don't mirror the literary structures we know so well. Perhaps sections of our lives do - but there's no narrator to explain the key staging-points on the journey, and no knowledge of how many chapters are left. Thankfully.

'The assumption that men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that even we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherland and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn't question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift . . . well, you understand. For years I didn't take it personally.'

(chapter 3, section 18)

Time to end on a full-blown feminist tirade. When did you first notice that history was written not only by the victors but also by the men? When I was growing up, I felt felt pretty confident that I could grow up to be anything, although I'm sure I picked up my fair share of gender-related baggage from society along the way. But as a young Catholic I remember thinking that it really would be very odd to have a female priest. Why? Well, because men are so much more authoritative, of course. I wouldn't take a sermon from a woman. And that was me as a child - nobody had forced me to think that way - I'd worked it out for myself. I'd like to give that childhood self a talking-to now, and ask why it was OK for most of the teachers at school to be female, but not for the priest. Really - why?

Things are so much better now than in the 1970s when Marilyn French was writing The Women's Room. We no longer assume that the doctor will be a man, nor that a person's partner will be female if they are male, and vice versa. But when I look at the images we're still given in the media, I see that we still have a long way to go. Have you ever heard the Today programme presented by two women? It's not unusual to have one female panellist on Have I Got News for You?, but can you image it with four, and a female host? Or Question Time? It's only when we've overcome our surprise at such events that we will ever be able to say that we don't need feminism. And therefore, I would recommend The Women's Room to anyone who wants to understand where we've come from, and how far we still have to go.