Black Milk - Elif Shafak [44]
Sand had also started wearing male clothing—a topic that the gossipers jumped upon with joy. As an aristocratic woman it was her civic duty to dress to the nines, paying great attention to her attire, speech and manners, but she did just the opposite by choosing comfortable and serviceable male outfits. Her fondness for pipe smoking was an even bigger scandal. In an era in which women were expected to be agreeable, sociable ladies and nothing more, she walked around in men’s clothes with a pipe in her mouth and radical ideas in her head. Like a tall tree that attracts lightning, she drew attention and anger. In the end, her aristocratic title was taken away from her. But nobody could confiscate the name she had given herself. She was, and is today, George Sand.
As Ivan Turgenyev once said, she was “a kind hearted woman, and a brave man!”
Jane Austen fell in love once. She was someone who criticized women marrying for wealth, status or a sense of security, firmly believing that one could marry only for love. Yet, though she loved and was loved in return, due to class differences, the marriage was not allowed to happen. His name was Tom Lefroy—a young man who had nothing to his name but would one day become the chief justice of Ireland. In a letter dated January 1796 and addressed to her sister Cassandra, Austen confessed that Tom was the love of her life. But she quickly added, “When you receive this, it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea.” Heartbroken, she retreated to her corner, to her writing.
“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and ill informed female who ever dared to be an authoress,” she said. It was not true, of course, and she knew it. Austen was very knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, having been admirably educated by her father—a clergyman—brothers, aunt and then through her own uninterrupted reading. She had a sharp tongue and a penchant for playfulness and sarcasm.
Years later, she was offered marriage again, this time by a respected man of great means. Though she was fond of her “solitary elegance,” as she once called her singleness, she accepted the offer. Finally she was going to become a wife, start a family and manage her own home. With these thoughts and hopes, she went to bed early. When she woke up the next morning, the first thing she did was to send a note of apology to her suitor. She had decided not to marry.
I often wonder what happened that night. What surreal place did Jane Austen visit in her dreams that made her change her mind? Did she have nightmares? Did she imagine herself scrubbing the staircase of a hundred-floor paper house with a bucket full of ink, watching every stair crumble as she cleaned and cleaned? What was it that made her decide against walking down the aisle?
Of all the American women writers of earlier generations, there is one that holds a special place in my heart: Carson McCullers. Perhaps it is because I came upon her work at a time when I was discovering the world and myself. Her words had a shattering effect on me. It was my last year of high school when I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, drawn more to the title of the book than the name of the author. The year before I was very popular at school, if only for a few weeks, having newly arrived in Ankara from Madrid, where I had spent my teenage years. The kids in my new class had been thrilled to learn that I could speak Spanish and had even been to a bullfight. But the introvert in me had not taken long to show up and the sympathetic curiosity in the eyes of my classmates had been gradually replaced first by an absolute indifference, then a judgmental distance. Girls thought I was unsociable, boys thought I was bizarre, teachers thought I was aloof, and I trusted no one but books. That is when I met Carson McCullers.