hold up, they don't love you like I love you

I shall never forget the occasion where I was visiting a school as a writer and the whole place suddenly fell into an uproar because the school tomboy - a most splendid Britomart of a girl - had beaten up the school bully. Everything stopped in the staffroom while the teachers debated what to do. They wanted to give the tomboy a prize, but decided reluctantly that they had better punish her and the bully too. They knew that if, as a child, you do pluck up courage to hit the bully, it is an act of true heroism - as great as that of Beowulf in his old age. I remember passing the tomboy, sitting in her special place of punishment opposite the bully. She was blazing with her deed, as if she had actually been touched by a god. And I thought that this confirmed all my theories: a child in her position is open to any heroic myth I care to use; she is inward with folktales; she would feel the force of any magical or divine intervention.

Ask any woman & she’ll tell you why Eve bit / into that apple. Why she chose the universe instead / of you.

Helen is not of Troy and not of Sparta. She does not live in the towers of burning Ilium, or the ruined palaces of once-great Greece– No, she is found between the folds of history over and over and over again. Blamed and de-famed and cruelly scorned, She is every woman who bears the burden of the faults of men and gods. She is all of us– History repeating itself, maybe to punish maybe to teach maybe to remind But it does not matter– Whatever might be the ill-taught lesson, the shouts of the imprisoned and deprived are forever lost in the clanging of weapons, false pride and forgotten women. Sing, o goddess, the rage of Helen –which launched not a thousand ships but was stifled and silenced by a war fought wrongly in her honour.

“To see Jane Austen’s writing desk, you have to go to the British Library in London. It’s in a glass case in their Treasures of the British Library display, across from one of Shakespeare’s folios and a few cases away from some Beatles sheet music. It is a very small desk, and foldable, designed to be easily stowed away, which it must have been often; Austen wrote in her parlor and would hide her writing whenever callers stopped by. At the British Library it is open, with very small spectacles pinned to one corner and the tiny notebook that held the first draft of Persuasion lying on top of it, splayed flat so you can see Austen’s fine, precise handwriting. Under the shadow of that desk, the disciplined confinement of her novels acquires visceral force. This much space was she permitted, and no more. In the display case next to Austen’s desk is Dickens’s first draft of Nicholas Nickelby, in a notebook that dwarfs Austen’s entire desk, with generous margins and looping, scrawly handwriting. It is impossible for me to imagine what Austen might have done with that kind of freedom, that kind of certainty of her own right to take up space.”