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The Women Who Dared to Be Different

The Trailblazing Women Who Dared to Be Different

Firebrands author Joanna Scutts explains why she set out to re-examine the literary canon and highlight the fantastic authors that have been underappreciated and overlooked throughout history.

By Joanna Scutts
23 September 2024

Even a keen and curious reader might be forgiven for assuming that literature, going back a generation or two, never had a place for women. The handful of familiar names – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Woolf – can seem like exceptions proving that rule.

Yet women have always been storytellers, poets and playwrights, the guardians of history and myth, family lore and social ritual. Where they have been excluded, historically, is from education and from power. If they managed to become writers against the odds, they found their reputations and legacies were vulnerable.

Even if they were popular and widely read (and often because they were popular and widely read) their presence, on bookshelves and syllabi, and in the wider cultural consciousness, was often fleeting. Scores of once-famous writers have been lost – overlooked, underestimated, dismissed, neglected and forgotten – in this way, and too many brilliant, funny, weird and incendiary voices remain muted.

Too many brilliant, funny, weird and incendiary voices remain muted

This book sets out to change that, by introducing readers to twenty-five daring women whose work still has the capacity to shake up our expectations and spark new conversations. They produced everything from temple hymns to muckraking journalism, via poetry, memoir, drama, fiction, film and innumerable hybrid literary forms.

In terms of class and occupation, they include aristocrats and bohemians, workers and warriors, immigrants and servants, farmers’ daughters and heiresses. They were married and widowed, mothers and spinsters, straight and queer. Some of these women were in their twenties when they did their best work, but just as many were in their forties or seventies. The variety shows us there is no single way to be a woman writer.

There is no single way to be a woman writer

And even that label should give us pause. I use it because, for the most part, these writers lived and worked in times and places where sex was destiny, and the gender binary was rigidly enforced and violently policed.

For the nonbinary Pauli Murray and the gender-rebellious George Sand, in particular, the label ‘woman writer’ feels neither accurate nor sufficient. It says more about the reception of their work than the way they lived in the world.

When our women’s literary canon contains just a handful of names, it’s easy to think that only a certain kinds of women can write. Money makes it possible and children, surely, make it impossible.

But here we have Kay Boyle and Lucille Clifton, both mothers of six, and both prolific, prize-winning, politically active writers: perennially short of cash, yet humane and courageous in their art throughout their lives.

Here too we have writers like Mary Borden and Mary Heaton Vorse, witnesses to war and political violence, challenging the notion of what women “should” write about. History acts on them all, but for some more dramatically than others.

The biographical details of Olympe de Gouges, caught up in the throes of the French Revolution, or of Juana Manuela Gorriti, fleeing across borders amid the turbulence of nineteenth-century Latin American politics, themselves read like stories. My title is borrowed from Woolf, a term she used in A Room of One’s Own for women of the nineteenth century who dared to be writers.

A firebrand is a burning piece of wood

A firebrand originally named a burning piece of wood, used to light a path or ignite a blaze – a term dating back to the era of one of my earliest subjects, the fourteenth-century poet and feminist foremother Christine de Pizan.

Later, it came to describe, figuratively, a person who lit a trail, like Christine herself (straight to hell, her critics said.) Taken together, these profiles demonstrate the breadth and scope of women’s writing and of women’s identities throughout literary history. Nobody here is a writer you should read, a missing link in a secure chain of “great” literature. I don’t think that’s how it works.

Rather, they’re collected here for what they can spark in us, their newest readers. For how they might open us up to new subjects, experiences and styles, and help us look at the past in new ways—if nothing else, putting paid to our assumptions about silent, cloistered women. In that spirit, this book is an invitation to the pleasure of discovery, to what I hope is a rich, rewarding literary feast

In twenty-five witty and vibrant biographical essays, Firebrands introduces us to the brilliant and complex women writers that every discerning reader should know about

Essay Collection
Hardback
26 September 2024
ISBN 9780715655269

‘Scutts’ companionable and sprightly volume of literary women deftly questions the gatekeeping terms of the literary canon, delivering profound insights with a lightness of touch’ Catherine McCormack, author of Woman in the Picture

From Murasaki Shikibu, the Japanese author of one of the world’s earliest novels, and Christine de Pizan, a poet in the royal court of medieval France, to Harriet Jacobs, who drew the world’s attention to the horrors of slavery through her own experience, Firebrands explores the lives and works of twenty-five extraordinary women writers.

Joanna Scutts guides the reader through the centuries and across the world, hailing the fascinating lives and astonishing literary achievements of these women who dared to write against the odds. Brilliantly researched and fiercely uncompromising, Firebrands is a reminder to all of us to question what – and who – is considered part of the canon.

The Early Bird Catches the Boat to Egg Island

The Early Bird Catches the Boat to Egg Island

Jonathan Hollins recounts his adventures on Egg Island, cataloguing the species that call the northern shore of St Helena home, and staying downwind of the signature scent

There’s a reason Egg Island glows like the summit of Everest in the sunlight. And it isn’t snow.

It’s bird shit.

Or to put a more genteel gloss on it: guano.

Such was guano’s value, and the abundant fertility bound within its fishy phosphates that it was nicknamed ‘white gold’.

south atlantic islands map
Map showing the South Atlantic Islands of St Helena, Tristan da Cunha and Ascension.

On the offshore islets of Namibia some 1,000 miles across the Atlantic – and before the advent of artificial fertilizers – gun battles were fought over the possession of the thick deposits left by millennia of abluting seabirds.

But on Egg Island, shaped like the protruding knee of a Titan on the northern shore of St Helena, it was a more placid affair: men on ropes chipping off stalactites of guano from the nests of brown noddies and dropping them into the cutters below.

The practice of harvesting guano has now stopped because Egg Island is a nesting site of international importance. And the reason for that is blessed absence of rats and cats.

And the reason for that is blessed absence of rats and cats

Setting aside the colonies of cliff dwelling noddies and the occasional magnificent long-tailed tropic bird, the majority of the nests belong to the charming and diminutive Madeiran storm petrels: ‘stormies’ to their friends.

The first challenge is always to get on the island. I was visiting in a purely veterinary capacity at the request of seabird guru Annalea Beard, herself birdlike in stature and wholly at ease with her feathered friends.

Johnny Herne, a local ‘Saint’ boatowner and a masterful helmsman, backed the stern of his vessel with meticulous care, his eyes pinned to the near vertical but jagged, seaworn rockface as he countered the surge of the sea with gentle thrusts of forward and reverse on the propellers.

Only in the scant few seconds when the rise of the water, the stern, and a set of particularly grippy ledges all co-align in perfect harmony is the leap made. At the urgent command of the crewman, we sprang across the gap and latched onto the rockface with steely decisiveness: hesitation is a recipe for dousing and a potential encounter with propeller blades. Sometimes I truly bless my simian roots. From there it’s a steep rock hopping climb up the Titan’s thigh to the knee.

From there it’s a steep rock hopping climb up the Titan’s thigh to the knee

A rounded summit with a large gun emplacement, its dismounted cannon pointing impotently out to sea beside a cocoa-stone bread oven hosting not loaves but an angry tropic bird incubating her eggs.

The island is not a hangout for the nasally sensitive. It steams and welters in the heat and humidity, enveloping the hapless visitor in a miasmic wave of ammonia and last year’s fish paste, potent enough to tear up the eyes. For now, I was the hapless visitor – and yet despite this noxious onslaught I was relishing every moment.

The stormies’ nests are strewn over the summit, in areas so dense that every footstep must be chosen with extreme care. Some of the nests are natural, under the cover of shattered rocks, others are small villages of roofed flowerpots with rock porches created by the conservation team to encourage breeding.

Each has a house number on the underside of the lid. It was nesting time, and the pair of us worked our way through the villages, checking for eggs, fluffy newly hatched chicks and adults, calling out ring numbers when found, ringing when not. For this, Annalee is an adept, wielding pliers with surgical delicacy around legs as thin and brittle as matchsticks. But my skill, DNA blood sampling, was equally as fine.

Stormies are the great acrobats of the sea, skimming the crests and troughs of the waves with unparallelled agility on tiny, parchment-thin wings, their chocolate brown bodies no bigger than a thumb. Imagine the basilic vein under the wing, like a thread pulled from a blue towel and the smallest vein I have ever sampled.

Imagine the basilic vein under the wing, like a thread pulled from a blue towel and the smallest vein I have ever sampled

The trick is not to use an unwieldy syringe, but to pierce the vein with a fine-gauge needle after plucking a few downy feathers and clarifying the skin with spirit. The resultant bleb of blood is drawn up using the natural suction of a capillary tube.

I then transferred the blood to labelled vials by delicately blowing down the tube, taking great care not to create a bewildering scientific paper by adding my own DNA. The vials contained the best preservative of all: absolute alcohol. That’s 99.8% ethanol, which knocks every fermented beverage known to man into a cocked hat.

Why go to such bother? Because the days of yore when naturalists would run around with nets and guns, bag a specimen, preserve it by drying, stuffing and glueing, measure up its distinguishing characteristics then stick it in a reference collection, have been trounced by DNA analysis. DNA rips away ambiguity.

It deciphers the biological palimpsest and reads the hidden text. There’s a fair chance that the St Helena petrel is a separate species, and that would be a scientific breakthrough. But the debate still rages on.

But the debate still rages on

‘That’s it,’ said Annalee, rummaging in her pack for the radio. ‘I’ll call up the boat then we’ll send off the samples and see if they can make head or tail of them.’ It was our third set, including a previous evening of mist netting when we had collected data from over a hundred birds. ‘Maybe this time we can say whether they are definitively a different species.’

We both accomplished the leap down into the open stern of the boat without too much loss of dignity. Meanwhile Johnny had been fishing and his tub was full of grouper and yellow fin tuna, both excellent eating.

‘Help yourself to dinner,’ he shouted generously over the roar of the engine as he gunned the vessel away from the rocks. But even as he said it, I could see that a speedboat was heading straight for us, and it wasn’t sparing the outboards. At the last moment, as if to avert a collision, it slewed sideways to a perfect halt, raising a curtain of spray. It was the skilful handling of Craig Yon, owner of a local dive business.

‘Joe, you have to come quickly, you have to save my dog. She’s dying. Please, please come now.’ Craig had the unflappable disposition of a marine, but his dogs were his passion.

‘Of course, Craig, or course.’ I clambered across the divide and Craig tore me back along the coast to Jamestown.

Never a dull moment for an island vet.

Enjoy more adventures with animals on the South Atlantic Islands

You can enjoy more fascinating tales of island vetting in his hugely entertaining and affectionate memoir, Vet at the End of the Earth – out now.

vet at the end of the earth

Memoir
Paperback
368 pages
ISBN 9780715655542

‘A delightful, fascinating and entertaining book’ – Dr Hilary Jones MBE

The role of resident vet in the British Overseas Territories of the Falklands, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha and Ascension encompasses the complexities of caring for the world’s oldest land animal – a 200-year-old giant tortoise – and MoD mascots at the Falklands airbase; pursuing mystery creatures and invasive microorganisms; relocating herds of reindeer; and rescuing animals in extraordinarily rugged landscapes, from subtropical cloud forests to volcanic cliff faces…

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