All around the world, haggis is being toasted, bagpipes being piped and neeps and tatties roasted as poetry lovers in Scotland and elsewhere – as well as anyone looking for an excuse to pour a generous dram of whisky – celebrate Thursday’s birthday of Robert Burns, a candidate for the #MeToo movement if ever there was one.
Behind every celebration of a great man lies a woman who could be equally venerated, but usually isn’t. Virginia Woolf, whose contribution to and influence on literature has been immense, was born on the same day as Ayrshire’s favourite son – yet year after year, no one shows up to her party.
The past decade alone has seen big anniversaries for Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Charles Dickens and Anthony Burgess, chock-full of biographies, documentaries and public talks. This February sees celebrations for the centenary of that staple of Edinburgh literature, Muriel Spark (although she lived the bulk of her adult life in Tuscany), and Emily Brontë’s bicentenary is due in July.
But women’s writing is valued differently – that is, less – and the public attention (and public money) spent on celebrating it misses an opportunity to do something truly radical and get people thinking about literature and who produces it in a different way. These celebrations could be used not just to celebrate the work of well-known writers but to bring the lesser-known ones to light. Give us Aphra Behn or Radclyffe Hall if you want historical figures, or celebrate the likes of Jackie Kay and Liz Lochhead while they’re still around to appreciate it.
In recent years, many individuals have taken to reading work only by women or writers of colour; efforts that do, in a small way, tackle the prejudices underpinning what is published, reviewed and read in the UK. But when literary history is whitewashed to erase or minimise women’s contributions, except for the occasional centenary celebration, this is a gesture tantamount to fighting fire with a water pistol.
Of course, Burns Night isn’t solely about Burns, and suggesting that we spend even one 25 January celebrating the work of a queer woman with mental illness over one of Scotland’s biggest exports is guaranteed to get some people frothing at the mouth. But when we celebrate it, what are we really saying is of cultural importance? It’s rarely an excuse for literary criticism, but why not? Just last year, Glasgow Women’s Library celebrated a Woolf Supper, commissioning female writers to respond to both Woolf’s and Burns’s work from a feminist angle. This event highlighted how rare it is for women to be given the stage, to remind us that some of our great men weren’t so great after all. If we can’t do that this year, of all years in recent history, when can we?
It was Woolf who said, “One cannot think well, love well or sleep well if one has not dined well,” which seems like a call for a riotous shindig or at least a slap-up meal (perhaps made with a copy of Orlando in one hand). The mealtimes in her novels are sure to leave anyone with an appetite whetted for more than just her words; you could almost use To the Lighthouse as your recipe for boeuf en daube, such is the detail. (“The beef, the bayleaf, and the wine – all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question.”) This is a woman whose life was studded with anecdotes about food: she was a keen pickler, once baked her own wedding ring into a cake and had a friendly rivalry with her sister over their bread-making skills. Not surprisingly, her (fraught) relationship with her cook was rich and complex enough to fill an entire biography.
So, tonight, buy the flowers yourself, pull together a meal out of The Bloomsbury Cookbook (turbot in aspic can’t possibly be worse than haggis) and ask more seriously: why don’t we have such an iconic day dedicated to a woman writer?
