Jacqueline Rose

One of the problems for right-wing promoters of ideal family life is that there is no way of predicting its outcome. It is as if those who confidently assert that absent fathers spell delinquency for the children, inadequate mothers addiction, divorce an incapacity to hold onto relationships or to love in a sustained way, never stop to ask why it is that the most stable and long-lasting of family unions can produce offspring who run wild, turn to drugs, contract out of loving, who seem, often perversely and inexplicably, to be committed to the most extreme forms of gratifying and/or punishing themselves. The union of Frances Polidori and Gabriele Rossetti, parents to Maria, William, Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, was by all accounts harmonious, affectionate, enduring. Eccentric, not without drama (he was a poet and revolutionary in exile from Italy), it nonetheless offered in terms of devotion, engagement and cultural stimulation a model that might still pass today as a middle-class ideal of what the family should give a child. And yet of the four children, only William was able to enter, let alone sustain, an attachment even vaguely resembling that of his parents. Maria became a nun, Gabriel the painter and poet descended, after the suicide of his wife, into drugs and breakdown, Christina the poetess lived as an ascetic, her religious devotion powerless to assuage the self-loathing which seems to have dominated so much of her adult life. (According to more than one account, she died raving at her own perdition.) ‘Why, one wonders,’ as Jan Marsh puts it, ‘did the four siblings have such difficulties when their parents’ marriage was so happy?’ And on the diametrically opposed nature of Maria and Christina’s religious experience (respectively utmost contentment and utmost pain): ‘Why two sisters, growing up in the same environment, should respond so differently to the same religious influences is a question not easily answered.’ This is a biography which often has recourse to such questions, and it is at its best, as in these examples, when it is least certain about the answer.

One of the strangest things Virginia Woolf ever did was to travel with Leonard to Germany for part of their annual holiday in April 1935. The vigour of German anti-semitism was by this point clear and Hitler’s power and at least some of his worst intentions towards Britain were recorded by Woolf in her diaries (‘There is some reason I suppose to expect that Oxford Street will be flooded with poison gas one of these days’). But it wasn’t uncharacteristic of her to make light of danger. Although in many ways her life seems closeted, guarding its safety till the last, Virginia Woolf took risks with herself. Five years later, caught in an air-raid with Ben Nicolson, who sagely threw himself to the ground, she stood still and lifted her arms to the sky. More sinisterly, caught in the middle of a flag-waving crowd of Nazi supporters shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ in the course of the trip to Germany, she had raised her arm in salute.

A passion for celebrity is not something one is meant to talk about. There are worlds, or rather circles, where, if you do, it is assumed that what you are really claiming for yourself is a type of intellectual slumming. If, for example, you admit to or even boast of reading Hello! magazine, an addiction to which I happily confess, reading Hello! could not possibly be what you are really boasting about. ‘Is it true that you read Hello!?’ I am sometimes asked in disbelief – an appropriate enough wording, ‘is it true?’, since celebrity depends for its existence on hearsay, innuendo and gossip (although what is distinctive about Hello! is that it doesn’t, or not quite). Admitting to a passion for celebrity, it seems, is like flaunting a shameful secret. So there might be an intimate, even passionate, connection between the cult of celebrity and shame.

The language of survival has always been fundamental to feminism. Germaine Greer seems to be convinced that the species is heading for extinction. (Some time ago, in an article in the Observer, she envisaged a time ‘when, far in the future, the human race has exterminated itself.’) For a time, Adrienne Rich believed that what was destroying itself was patriarchy: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (‘When We Dead Awaken’). Women’s task in advancing its end was simple, brutal and clear: ‘As women, we have our work cut out for us.’‘

Biography loves Sylvia Plath. When I ask students what they know of Plath, they almost invariably reply that she killed herself and was married to Ted Hughes. Occasionally they run these two snippets together as if the second were, in some mysterious and not wholly formulated way, related to the first; as if together they add up to something that leaves nothing more to be said. I watch this story shut down around her, clamping her writing into its hollow wooden frame. Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.