Today I’d like to welcome Thorne Moore, best selling author of A Time for Silence, who is published by Honno Press. Thorne’s latest novel, The Covenant, is a prequel to A Time for Silence and is published on August 20th 2020.
As a child I was very fond of the Narnia books (mostly because of the Pauline Baynes illustrations). One sentence in The Magician’s Nephew made a deep impression on me. “Aunt Letty was a very tough old lady: aunts often were in those days.” I really liked that. All the images I had had of Victorian women until then, thanks to BBC adaptations of Dickens, usually starring Martin Jarvis, had been of sweet little things with very pretty dresses and ringlets, on a par with fluffy kittens and with about the same IQ, or sad victims doomed by poverty or consumption.
There’s Victorian literature for you, or at least the variety written by men, who lived among women, were raised by them, nursed by them – women they lusted after and married, and yet men never seemed to rise above smug contempt for them. Women are portrayed as feeble and infantile, in need of protection and mastery. Show them as strong and they are mere figures of ridicule, like Trollope’s Mrs Proudie.
Thorne with Honno author Judith Barrow, and Firefly editor, Janet Thomas
Of course Victorian literature written by women presented a completely different picture of female understanding and determination in the period. In the works of the Brontës, Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot, women were rational creatures with at least as much determination and fight in them as the men who treated them as an amusing sub-species.
Real women, like fictional ones, were the same. Law, church and society were against them. Women who failed to marry were objects of contempt and pity. Those who did marry, officially ceased to exist. In the 18th century, it had been decreed that “By marriage, the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband.”
So it wasn’t just the vote that women lacked. A wife couldn’t hold property of her own, couldn’t keep her own earnings, couldn’t seek divorce from an intolerable union, couldn’t claim custody of her own children, couldn’t have control over her own body and couldn’t even claim to be a person in her own right. If she had paid work, it was at a far lower rate than any man. If she fell into ‘sin’ she was utterly outcast.
See her on the bridge at midnight
Saying, ‘Farewell, blighted love!’
There’s a scream, a splash, good ‘eavens!
What is she a doing of?
I am sure plenty of women, faced with what life threw at them, did choose suicide as the only way out. And disturbingly, male writers seemed to like the idea of women drowning themselves rather than living to face shame. But many women refused to go under. They refused to accept their lot. They refused to bow to injustice.
They fought back, sometimes at immense cost to themselves and though Parliament, run by men, gets the credit for any changes reluctantly forced through, it was often women’s struggle that lit the touch paper – not just the suffragettes like the Pankhursts, but women like Caroline Norton who campaigned tooth and nail for the Custody of Infants Act, the Matrimonial Causes Act and the Married Women’s Property Act. Or Josephine Butler who fought for the legal rights of wives and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act which allowed for the forced and often violent examination of prostitutes. Or Florence Nightingale 
whose reforms improved the status of female work and raised levels of health care. Or Annie Besant who fought for the rights of the matchgirls to better pay and conditions. Denied the schools and colleges open to their brothers, women fought their way into education, science, medicine. Intrepid women like Gertrude Bell conquered mountains, deserts and jungles, while thousands of ordinary women took their fate in their own hands and sailed for the colonies in the hope of making a better life for themselves. Despite their corsets, crinolines and bustles, women weren’t meek and amenable. They never have been.
In the workplace, though they were lucky to receive half the pay given to men, they were indomitable providers, slaving to keep their families from starvation when husbands died, or fell sick, or deserted. They didn’t fade away if fortune turned against them, they kept fighting, doing whatever it took to keep going, whether that meant slaving in an unhealthy factory, managing the family business, keeping geese in the back yard, taking in washing, or prostitution. Whatever it took. The world pictured women as sweet simpering angels in the house. They were better than that. They were human.
In my new novel, The Covenant, Leah Owen is a woman after my own heart. She has intelligence and determination. She has dreams, and when they come to nothing she turns to the next. She fights. She values her self-respect. Which doesn’t mean she enjoys the struggle. Few women would have done. She’s an Aunty Sally and the world is throwing everything it can find at her. But no matter what is thrown, she refuses to fall. Unless by her own choice.
My links
The Covenant: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08CZJ8BSL
Honno: https://www.honno.co.uk/
website: https://thornemoore.com/
FB Author page: https://www.facebook.com/thornemoorenovelist
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThorneMoore
Amazon author page http://amzn.to/1Ruu9m1
