What if there were only love-stories?

What novels would we never write?

I love Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ so much, I’m still tweaking my adaptation which will go live at the London Library next month. Woolf feels so contemporary. Asks the big questions. When I read her, I always feel that challenge as a writer as if she still whispers in my head: “Wake up.”

She asks this brilliant question in Room as she weighs the history of women writing (or not writing) and what they wrote:

What if men were only represented in literature as lovers of women?

Never the friend of men or soldiers or travellers, prophets...

Thinkers or dreamers.

How few parts in Shakespeare could be allotted to them.

We’d have most of Othello, some of Anthony but...

No Caesar no Brutus. No Hamlet, no Lear.

Literature would be impoverished.

As indeed it has because of the countless doors shut upon women. Imagine love being the only interpreter for all those stories.

What a small section of women is known to men.

Love interest, then – is that what we are in literature? The mother. The princess. The whore. The old lady sat dusty in the corner. Yikes! That’s how women have been represented in literature, Woolf tells us.

Just looking across at 'The hundred best novels of all time' recently named by the Guardian Newspaper: Number one was George Elliot’s ‘Middlemarch’, and that is surely one of my favourite novels. Such a brilliant study of the awakening of a young woman’s sensibility and desire, realization of her own devastating mistake, and the playing out of her predicament. It is a deeply profound and satisfying read, but is still essentially a book about a young woman negotiating love and marriage. Late Victorian, so it’s about a marriage going wrong, before it goes right.

In Shakespeare, I love Juliet and Rosalind, both have brilliant, vigorous minds. Juliet promises so much before it all goes teenage. I can never work out why she doesn’t just run off to Mantua to find her lover. Maybe she would have shacked up with Romeo, or perhaps she would have found a whole different life there.

In ‘As You Like it,’ Shakespeare reduces Rosalind’s great rebellion into obsessions with terribly written love-letters hung on trees in the forest. Rosalind somehow started out as Hamlet, with the consciousness of her uneasy position, transforms into a boy (so far so exciting), runs away from the city and then is shredded and ends up being written out of all the juicy ‘All the world’s a stage’ stuff and even if she does pretend to deny the love she is feeling, she is reduced to a mere lovestruck girl, obsessed with a boy, and by the end is so much less interesting.

I love ‘Jane Eyre’, Charlotte Brontë is my absolute all time hero, but again it is the love-story she plays out to the finish. It is a wrestling of equals, and I adore that, but I wonder what that great mind would have done with more freedom and opportunity?

Although in her final extraordinary novel, ‘Villette’, Brontë can’t quite allow the happy ending for Lucy Snowe. Like Jo in ‘Little Women’, and the brilliant double- ending that Gerwig suggests in her wonderful movie: that the real ending is the book being published, not the ‘fantasy’ family and house and babies that the novel describes and the film takes us to. That in the same way as Louisa May Allcott never married, in the end Gerwig couldn’t quite let her go off into the sunset with her boring man (lol), and neither could Brontë in ‘Villette.’

So what women writers do shake off the love-story?

Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, one of the first, both as science-fiction and new narratives created by women. The story of the consequences of reckless ambition, a mighty tale, but with no woman centrally, it is still the story of a female writer challenging and wrestling with the male narrative. And Shelley was amazingly eighteen.

But now in the canon we have the stunning genius of Toni Morrison. The brilliant mind of Margaret Atwood. Caryl Churchill, in the theatre, sharp and precise as a knife. Octavia E Butler and her illuminating and incredible world-building imagination. Here women writers dive deep into the big and perhaps more important questions. About slavery, about otherness, about surviving or not surviving the terrors that are inflicted on them by the powers that be, the impoverished circumstances they find themselves in and a society that never belonged to them.

The second greatest novel in the Guardian’s list is Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ and for me that should be number one. Probably the most devastating book I have ever read. I am reading Atwood’s ‘The Testaments’ at the moment and loving it. Atwood comes at it all with a sledge hammer, and I have very deep respect for that.

Meanwhile, at the movies: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ is doing its thing and illuminates other possibilities of storytelling for women. Where you’d have to say the love-story in it really sunk (no-one cared), and the real love-story for Andy is perhaps how we all feel watching that film, slightly in love with the disdain and genius of Miranda (or maybe just Meryl Streep). Here is a film that does explore the dreams of women. Careers, Ambition. Cost. Friendship. It almost transcends that film about women, just a film about people that happen to be women.

Something else Woolf orders us softly to do.

“And like women.”

She notes that Cleopatra did not like Octavia. Again in literature, we see women crashing up against each other, vying and destroying each other, but Woolf notes simply and truthfully – ‘women have friends.’ Women like women. What would I do without my brilliant female friends? I think that’s almost my favorite part of DWP2, the final emergence of a friendship between Andrea and Emily, the Hathaway and Blunt characters (not to undermine the beautiful friendship between Nigel and Andy that runs throughout both films).

That at last they can admit that they like each other.

So generalizations apart. Love stories, other stories. A mash up of both. What are we writing now? Woolf doesn’t judge us for the stories we write. She just challenges us to take different paths. To try different things. Be braver. Ask the big questions. Create the world as we see and experience it:

Reality overwhelms you walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real.

It is what remains when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge, it is what is left of time and our loves and hates.

And it is the writer’s business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ is a study of marriage, but also wrestling with the idea of being a female artist. The sacrifices that are made; in isolation. In childlessness. In walking at the edge of society. Incredible silences. The sting and power of being on the outside. Grab a copy, if you haven’t ever read it. Woolf moves through minds and rooms and consciousness; it becomes something utterly enthralling.

So yeah, full confession, I write love-stories (a love-story is central to my first novel), but my work asks questions too – about transactional relationships, about otherness, about violence. I am interested in different shapes of brains; neuro-diversity and what that does to my characters (and my writing). The experience of encountering an alien world as a clone, as an AI, or just as a woman. I think Woolf challenges us to walk away from the easy narratives, as we ourselves are having to do as women right now. She encourages us to think out of the box.

To like women.

Remember I told you that Shakespeare had a sister. She died young – she never wrote a word.

She lies now where the buses stop by that roundabout at Elephant and Castle.

Well, I believe that poet who never wrote a word and was buried at that roundabout - she still lives.

She lives in you and in me and many women who are not here because they are washing up or looking after the kids or working every hour....

But she lives because great poets do not die. They have continuing presence.

They need only the chance to walk among us in the flesh and I think it is now coming within your power to give.

I believe that if we live another hundred years, maybe less and that if we learn the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.

If we if we escape from the sitting room and see people not always in relation to each other but in relation to reality and the sky.

Not just love stories.

That we go out alone...

Then the chance will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body she so often laid down and she will find it possible to live and write her poetry.

She will be born.

Over and over.

She’ll come if we work for her.Even if we’re poor and we’ve got nothing.

She’ll come.

She’ll speak.