In this group biography, Biggs winds her own life’s struggles with the lives of eight women whose writings and lives have shaped her own - Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Recently divorced and struggling to find a new sense of identity and purpose, Biggs looks to her literary heroines for guidance on how to live a life less ordinary.
Looking at their lives in chronological order she examines the ways in which these women inspired each other, showing the possibilities open to them. She sees this ongoing conversation as an important one, and one that gives the sense of a tradition which we are all contributing to.
‘It is not that there is some sort of magical sisterhood, but that voices must accumulate before a single one can speak. … Underneath the homages and the flowers, the gentle rubbing and the over-identification, is an idea that instead of reading books in order to learn about history or science or cultural trends, women might draw benefit from thinking of themselves as being involved in a long conversation, in which they both listen and talk, and even manage in this way, over time, to establish a tradition.’
The links between the authors are not always strongly declared but Biggs gives us insight into how she has turned to them at the difficult moments of her life, taking comfort in their lives and those of the characters they conjured on the page. We see in her struggles a familiar one of a woman fighting the expectations of society on how life should look. Her final subject, Elena Ferrante, seeks to avoid some of the assumptions and particular readings of works by women by remaining something of an enigma. In hiding her real life from her audience she forces Biggs to delve deeper into the lives of her characters to find models for alternative ways of living.
An interesting aspect of many of these mini biographies is the relationship between marriage and creativity, and the struggle for partners who both have creative careers to find the space and freedom to engage fully with their individual pursuits. Sadly, the burden of family life often does not fall equally. Biggs seems to have struggled with this in her former marriage, looking to models of marriage that aim for the happiness of both, but having found it fell short.
This is an interesting read, with critical analysis of some of the texts, and the honest discussion of the aspects of the women’s lives which Biggs doesn’t always find entirely admirable. It is a reminder that nobody is perfect, and that judging someone’s behaviour through the lens of modern sensibilities will often find them lacking. I wasn’t entirely sure I enjoyed the insertion of personal memoir amid the story to begin with but as I read on I found it quite engaging, adding an emotive sense of the ongoing power of these literary work. Biggs’ struggles with an unwell mother and attempting to start again in the middle of life are honestly recounted and revealing. This is a love letter to the books that shape us, acknowledging the challenges the authors faced and accepting them as flawed human beings rather than mystical creatures to be put on a pedestal. Some of the authors I was more familiar with than others but in each chapter I found something new to fascinate, and enjoyed exploring another’s perspective on novels which I have read and loved.
‘Their example exists not in order that I might slavishly follow it but so that I might develop the confidence to let go of them and become the author of my own life.’
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