In an essay on “Women and Fiction,” Virginia Woolf wonders why there was hardly any “continuous” tradition of women writing before the eighteenth century, why women suddenly begin to write “almost as habitually” as men do and consistently produce the great classics of nineteenth century fiction (Jane Austen, two Brontës, and George Eliot), and why this writing should typically take fictional form (77). She warns us that any answer to these questions is liable to be more fiction—either a speculative construction or a kind of meta-fiction. An example of the former would be the Freudian thesis that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote because she hated her father (Lundberg and Farnham 159-63); an example of the latter would be that the theory we use to explain literature is itself a form of literature, as Oscar Wilde claims in “The Critic as Artist” (217).

But, if we differentiate them a little, there is perhaps a third way to answer Woolf’s questions, namely history. The rise of the novel may, for example, be linked to historical factors such as the rise of literacy; the rise of female writers may be linked to the more gradual extension of the benefits of literacy to women. By studying actual letters, the rise of the epistolary novel can be linked to the restrictions upon literate women in public life and the restrictions upon male correspondences to unmarried women in private life. The fall of the epistolary novel can be linked to the penny post, an innovation which made letter-writing almost as commonplace as texting is today. Travel writing may be linked to the history of travel, and autobiography to a secularization and universalization of the lives of saints and great men. Jane Austen’s use of free indirect speech may be attributed to her impatience with the omniscient narrators of old while her development of the conversational novel may be likewise attributed to her impatience with the slow pace of the epistolary form.

Woolf notes that what changed was not so much life itself but rather the way in which women could write, and therefore think, about life.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman’s life…it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer. (Granite and Rainbow 77)

As all of the reviewers of this paper have hastened to point out, this quite begs the question of what constitutes an ordinary life, and what would qualify as an extraordinary one.

In A Room of One’s Own, and even more entertainingly in Orlando, Woolf not only asks the question but answers it at no inconsiderable length. Unlike a man, for whom reading and writing is quite generally a part of professional life, a woman whose life depends on reading and writing is, for most of the history under consideration, an extraordinary phenomenon. Again unlike men, this means that every extraordinary woman leads—and often writes about—an ordinary life involving husband acquisition and household maintenance, child-bearing and child-rearing. In these ordinary lives, selfhood was not a particularly salient feature, no great premium was attached to the narrator’s voice, and business trips were rare enough to be noteworthy occasions. Because women’s lives have remained remarkably ordinary in this way, we may take two autobiographical accounts of travel separated by as much as three centuries of literary history and still make a meaningful comparison. By comparing, we may consider what has remained the same and what has changed to bring about the rise of the extraordinary woman writer from the ordinary woman’s life. Such is the purpose—and method—of the present paper.

The Book of Margery Kempe has been considered the first true autobiography in the English language (Jefferies and Horsfall 349). Yet it is a work which veers, in many passages, closer to auto-hagiography (Cooper 297). Of course, true auto-hagiography, like self-obituary, is not a possible genre in any language: any attempt to assert a claim of sainthood during one’s lifetime—leaving aside the obvious offence against modesty!—would usurp the formal monopoly on canonizing and writing the lives of saints held by the church. This very much affects the way that the book is written. Although this book claims apparitions, healings, direct communication with God, and escapes from natural and human disaster, the author is very careful not to make any claims of public miracles. Kempe repeatedly disavows the vocation of preaching—conscious of Saint Paul’s ban on women and ever sensitive to the threat of Lollardy, the author insists that her vocation is no more than the private act of prayer.

Yet in a very important sense, the existence of the book itself belies both claims: not only is it a clear instance of preaching, it is rendered legible by a miracle. Both the “Proem” and the “Preface,” or the shorter “Proem” at the outset, announce that the text itself was not actually written down by the author herself but rather dictated by her first to “a man who could neither well write English nor Dutch, so it was unable to be read save only by special grace” (7). When the manuscript was later given to the priest who later did write the book for her, he could not read the initial manuscript. It took four years for the scribe to be able to read and edit it.

Can we call this autobiography at all? Note that there is at least one exception to this third-person narration, where Kempe’s voice is clearly heard.

“And the bishop did no more to us that day, save that he made us right good cheer and said we were right welcome.” (45)

These words are extraordinary in content, but even more so in form.

First of all, with regard to content, these particular words describe the response of the local bishop to a woman who has petitioned him to opt out of the ordinary life of an ordinary woman: Kempe is asking for the right to permanently deny sex to her husband, in violation of her marriage vows. The bishop, with the husband’s apparent agreement, agrees to Kempe’s request, so his welcome and good cheer are, under the circumstances, quite extraordinary; the next day, however, he reverts to character, rejects her request, and so denies her the right to wear white clothing as an outward sign of her chastity. Kempe, however, defies him.

Secondly, and with regard to form, these words include the only use of the first person plural “us” and “we” in the narration of the book—almost every other instance of a first person pronoun appears in some direct reported speech. So elsewhere in the narration the putative author, Kempe, is referred to as “this creature,” “the said creature,” “the aforementioned” creature, or simply “she.” On the face of it, this formal feature might seem the most remarkable point of all; it would be astonishing in any book—rather like the great lipograms written in French by George Perec, such as La disparition, a novel of 312 pages written entirely without using the letter “e.” In an autobiography, the lack of “I” and “me” in the narration seems not only an oxymoron, but a contradiction in terms. Yet on closer scrutiny we find that this is somewhat little misleading. Elsewhere in Kempe’s story, the use of the first person does help to differentiate dialogue from narrative; in so doing it allows us to distinguish the author who is a character in the story from the author who is telling the story to the audience.

The mere lack of “I” and “me,” however is no evidence of a lack of subjectivity. What might suggest it is that Kempe does not appear to write or even to think for herself. For example, during her trip to Danzig in Prussia, Kempe is blown off course to Norway: Christ appears “speaking in her mind” and comforts her:

“With such manner of dalliance, and much more high and holy than ever I could write, Our Lord Comforted His creature, blessed may He be. Holy saints whom she prayed unto, dallied to her soul by the sufferance of Our Lord, giving her words of great comfort.” (303)

Note the use of “I”—and the use of “write”; above all, notice the almost immediate switch to “she” and “pray.” It seems likely that “I” and “write” do not refer to Kempe at all, but to the scribe, according to Anthony Bale, the Norwich monk Richard Salthouse.

Religion, of course, was not an extraordinary preoccupation for people of that time, but it was no occupation for women. When Kempe does make decisions concerning church doctrine, these are eventually ratified by a bishop, a parson, or at least a respectable anchorite. As a result, Kempe is decidedly mainstream when it comes to the major issues that were of great concern to late medieval clergy (Purvey 7); wherever possible, she distinguishes her views from those of the anti-establishment Lollards. In Bible literacy, the Lollards believed that the Bible should be read in English. Kempe, to avoid Lollardy, has Christ tutor her in simple Latin. In the holy sacraments, the Lollards denied the power of the church to grant indulgences. Kempe insists upon being regularly shriven. As far as church income was concerned, the Lollards stridently opposed the sale of relics, tithing, and were indifferent to pilgrimages. Kempe accepts both and much of the book describes a life of pilgrimage supported by money and gifts from her devotees)¹.

But although religion was a normal preoccupation, women were otherwise occupied. Here too, Kempe goes mainstream. Her denial of sex to her husband takes place only after she has given birth to fourteen children. There also appear to have been some lapses in chastity after her vow, e.g. the pregnancy in Chapter 21, and the accusation that husband and wife are disappearing to the woods periodically during the pilgrimage. It is quite certain that Kempe lusts after other men as an ordinary woman under those circumstances might, and in fact when we look at the chapters we see that a surprising number of them contain mundane thoughts of food, finery, and of course sex.

Kempe’s real claim to fame, and to eternal life in literature, lies elsewhere. It is precisely because this life is that of a private, if rather well-to-do, woman who supported mainstream practices like tithing, the celibacy of the clergy, the holiness of sacraments, the importance of pilgrimage, and the authority of the church and who occasionally lapses in her vows of chastity that she escapes persecution. Thanks to Kempe’s doctrinal conservatism and her occasional sinfulness, the implied comparison with the lives of saints and the passion of Christ passes as emulation and not as blasphemy. Kempe’s sometimes obscure distinction between public life and private devotion makes her a literary character—an abstract “creature” not only of God but of literature, who has the power to reflect publically upon private affairs. Not incidentally, it may have been highly useful to the various (male) voices anxious to ventriloquate her story and quell the Lollard heresy among ordinary people.

But the Lollards had just grievances against the church, and in order to remove the sting of these grievances, Kempe’s narrative must play a double game in more than a formal sense: it must concede and critique some of the more corrupt practices of the church. Consider the beginning of Kempe’s famous “parable of the bear,” in which she describes a bear which devours beautiful pear flowers and fruit and then “voids” them in the presence of a monk, much to the latter’s disgust and horror. Figure 2 shows us the original manuscript:

The original manuscript in Middle English reads:

Than seyd a doctowr whech had examynd hir befortyme,

Syr, sche telde me the werst talys of prestys that evyr I herde. The

Bischop comawndyd hir to tellyn that tale. Sir, wyth yowr reverens,

I spak but of o preste be the maner of exampyl, the whech as I have

lernyd went wil in a wode thorw the sufferawns of God for

the profite of hys sowle tyl the nygth cam upon hym.

In the modern English translation, it reads:

Then said a doctor who had examined her before:—“Sire, she told me the worst tales of priests that ever I heard.”

The Bishop commanded her to tell that tale.

“Sir, with reverence to you, I spoke but of one priest in the manner of example, who, as I have learnt went astray in a wood through the sufferance of God, for the profit of his soul, till the night came upon him.”

As we can see, one of the important additions to the text in Modern English is the punctuation and paragraphing, which did not exist in early or even Middle English (Moore 128). Until the eighteenth century—indeed in the first editions of the epistolary novels by Samuel Richardson—there was no standardization of quotation marks. Even novels published in the middle of the nineteenth sometimes use quotation marks in ways we would find unacceptable today, e.g. when the speaker refers to himself or herself in the third person within quotation marks. Similarly, the convention which requires a new paragraph with each speaker, followed rather rigorously in drama but somewhat less so in the novel, is not quite universal today. So in the time of Margery Kempe and for many centuries afterwards, it was really up to the reader to work out who was saying what, and pronouns played an essential role in doing this. Still today it is pronouns as much as punctuation help to define the difference between quoted speech, reported speech, and free indirect speech (Halliday and Matthiessen 528).

As was said of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the fossil record is quite incomplete. Eileen Power, in her 1975 papers on education of women in the Middle Ages, pointed sadly to the sheer lack of evidence (76). In recent years, this gap has been filled with daring speculation. In Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, for example, Lynn Staley hazards that the scribe is very likely a strategic invention on the part of Margery Kempe to gain authority for her text from her readers. To make a distinction between the “fictional scribe” and Margery Kempe herself, Staley uses the family name Kempe to refer to the author and the given name Margery to refer to the “creature.” According to Staley, it was a strategy on the part of Kempe to present Margery as illiterate to avoid “the contemporary distrust for those who possessed or could read religious books” (32). More importantly the “emphasis upon illiteracy may also indicate her sure understanding of the conventions of spiritual writings by or about women” (33). Staley’s is an ingenious argument, with two key drawbacks. First, the paucity of evidence makes it extremely difficult to falsify, but equally difficult to prove. Second, and more to the point for the present paper, if what she says is true, autobiographical writing has actually developed very little in four centuries.

It seems more likely that Staley is engaged in wishful thinking or what Amanda Anderson calls “aggrandized agency”—a teleological rewriting of history with the modern woman firmly in mind as an endpoint. So rather than arguing that Margery Kempe could read and write but has to pretend to be illiterate to have her voice heard, I take Margery Kempe’s open statement of her illiteracy at her word. But taking her at her word makes what follows still more extraordinary—not in the sense that it is the work of an illiterate, but in the sense that it is mark of an ordinary woman. There is, however, one way in which Margery Kempe is quite out of the ordinary, and it is precisely this point that allows us to compare her with another extraordinary writing woman.

Table 1 below compares the paragraph from Margery Kempe’s book about her accidental trip to Norway with an excerpt of a letter which Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about a similar misadventure.

Firstly, and most obviously, where Margery Kempe eschews first person subjects altogether, Wollstonecraft has a first person subject in almost every clause: the only real exception being the family that Mary is staying with, who she worries will be inconvenienced if she doesn’t depart for Norway (“it” in the last clause is a dummy, and it is “we” who will view the water and the wilderness). Wollstonecraft notices this herself, and places the following “advertisement” at the beginning of her book:

“In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person—‘the little hero of each tale’. I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thought, my letter, I found became stiff and affected: I, therefore determined to let remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give a just description of what I saw, but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh.” (241)

But we have already established that being the grammatical subject of each sentence does not in fact make one the hero of each tale—nor does the fact that Margery Kempe only very rarely uses the grammatical first person in narrative in any way imply that she is not the hero of her tale.

Secondly, although the whole book of Margery Kempe pays very little attention to temporal order and even warns the reader that Margery Kempe is simply recounting incidents as they occur to her mind and not as they occurred in time, each individual chapter, and particularly Kempe’s Norway adventure, tends to be organized as a sequence of events in time. This temporal organization is what Hayden White (5, 27) calls the “annal”—it is a set of slots which must be mentioned, even if nothing in particular happens there, as opposed to a “chronicle,” where only important events are recounted, or a narrative, which is a whole incident organized, often retrospectively, with regard to a moral or aesthetic purpose. In contrast, although Mary Wollstonecraft practically does not vary the clause subject, the time orientation of each clause seems to change: the night before (“we slept”), the morning after (“I rose”), a decision made at some indeterminate moment earlier (“I had determined,” an unrealized future (“to leave”), etc. She ends the paragraph well before its beginning—with having walked through the town on the Swedish side of the border until it had become tedious and having gone up the coast and seen nothing but sea and barren seashore. Clearly, Wollstonecraft has mastered the technology of non-linear narration in a way that would have been quite unthinkable for Margery Kempe.

But the third remarkable difference has to do with the distinction Eric Auerbach makes between the world of the Iliad, where instead of thinking people have visitations from deities and the world of the Odyssey, where people not only understand, but understand that other people understand as well (see “Odysseus’s Scar,” and also the 1976 work of Julian Jaynes). Both passages deal with extraordinary emotions; these form the sequel of one paragraph and the prequel of the other, but they differ in orientation and in expression. During the preceding tempest, Margery Kempe had become infuriated with God for apparently breaking the promise He gave that she would never “perish” at sea or on the land and for letting her enemies gloat over her imminent drowning. Naturally, this was a private thought (“She thought in her mind”). Just as she cannot preach openly, she cannot publicly blaspheme. Sure enough, Christ had appeared, backed up by the Virgin Mary, to give her the private reassurance she required (“speaking in her mind”); just as she could not perform miracles openly, she could not be seen to see visions, less this be interpreted as mere mental illness. Kempe then goes to church to offer thanks for her deliverance, where she falls weeping and wailing to the floor (305). In contrast, instead of walking around the town or continuing up the coast, Mary Wollstonecraft invites one of the daughters of her host to accompany them to a town on the Norwegian border and in so doing actually offers what Lisa Zunshine (128) would call a fourth level theory of mind: she knows (first level) that she will enjoy (second level) the sight of the girl enjoying herself (third level) and that the gentlemen will amuse themselves (fourth level) with her, freeing her up to enjoy the countryside (fifth level). None of this layered empathy is conveyed by “speaking in the mind”; all is conveyed by “I like to see a beautiful face animated by pleasure and to have an opportunity of regarding the country whilst the gentlemen were amusing themselves with her.” To build suspense, she ends with “I did not know, for I had not thought of it, that we were to scale some of the most mountainous cliffs of Sweden in our way to the ferry which separates the two countries” (265). In one case, privacy is a refuge from public dangers—in the other, publicness is a setting for private enjoyments. So in four centuries, women writers have mastered narration in their own voice, non-linear time-travel, and an astonishing ability to embed consciousness in consciousness (enjoyment within amusement within seeing within enjoying within knowing!).

Perhaps this is an illusion, brought about by carefully cherry-picking the data? A statistical analysis of the entire work, now made possible using the UAM Corpus Tool developed by Mick O’Donnell, allows us to confirm that these observations are patterns that are still robust when we compare the two works to each other. Table 2 shows a comparison of nearly ten thousand clauses from Margery Kempe and over twice that many from Mary Wollstonecraft. Because the sample sizes are different, we use frequency per thousand words as the basis for a t-test to determine statistical significance, and we can see that all of the observations we made on the basis of Table 1 are supported.

Firstly, although “I” and “me” are considerably more frequent in Wollstonecraft than in Kempe, once we take into account the use of “I” in dialogue and the use of “creature” to refer to Kempe, the amount of first person reference is quite similar. If we add Saint Augustine’s book Confessions (4.86% first person reference) and Rousseau’s book of the same name (7.03% first person reference), we find that each of the two women writers have lower rates of first person reference than either of the two males. With the exception of Margery Kempe, second and third person reference rates are not substantially different, and Margery Kempe’s result—10.15% third person reference—can be largely explained by her use of “this creature” to refer to herself.

Secondly, we can see that Wollstonecraft uses a much richer variety of finite and non-finite verb tenses to arrange the events in her letters than Kempe does—this tendency is significant at the level of p < .01 (that is, the chance of error in rejecting the hypothesis that there is no consistent underlying difference is only one in a thousand).

Thirdly, we can see from the example in Table 1 that the kind of “theory of mind” which concerned Zunshine, Jaynes and Auerbach requires the use of subordinating conjunctions, and the number of subordinating conjunctions used in Wollstonecraft is significantly higher.

So what do these three points, based on the analysis of two texts separated by three and a half centuries, suggest about the role of the ordinary woman in explaining extraordinary women writers? According to Fernand Braudel (92, 105, 330), the material lives of ordinary women changed little in the four centuries which separate the girlhood of Kempe in the late fourteenth century from the letters from Wollstonecraft’s travels in Scandinavia in the late eighteenth (something that Wollstonecraft’s descriptions seem to confirm). One change, of little material weight but of huge literary significance, lies in the spread of literacy—sufficiently extraordinary in the fifteenth century to make the mere composition of Kempe’s book the object of a miracle (Cooper 270) but sufficiently ordinary in the eighteenth so that Wollstonecraft’s book only comments on the lack of good education outside of basic literacy, and complains that the lack of good literature makes Swedish people gossipy (256).

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher, wished to postpone the baptism of his son to the moment when the child began to say “I,” when the child’s ego is able to posit itself as subject (Vygotsky 248). But historically it takes many centuries of change to invest even the tiniest word with its full literary significance. The birth of the woman writer required the conquest of the first person pronoun “I” that we see in Subject position in the clauses of Wollstonecraft, but this was only the culmination of a gradual process of narrativizing a device already used to differentiate dialogue from narrative and replacing this function with punctuation. This process made it possible to move from an “annal” to a “chronicle”—it was now possible to order events according to the way in which Wollstonecraft’s “little hero” experienced them. Furthermore, it provided the basis for Hayden White’s move to narrative: it provided a clear way of commenting on the moral meaning that did not require God, Jesus Christ or a panoply of saints to bear witness of events.

Why did it take so long? Ordinary women were always busy with ordinary lives, and even extraordinary women were often busy with the ordinary lives of others. Where Kempe required divine intercession to stop her husband “meddling” with her, Wollstonecraft merely remarks “It is well that women are not very delicate or they would only love their husbands because they were their husbands,” although she adds, for the sake of her lover’s feelings, “You must not term this innuendo saucy, for it does not come home” (296). The remark is not saucy, or even irrelevant. Jefferies and Horsfall remark, rather anachronistically, that Kempe “reports that she had fourteen children because she had no access to contraception.” There is, of course, no mention of contraception anywhere in her report, unless you count the crucial meeting with the Bishop where her husband agrees to a chaste marriage; had there been more reliable contraception available, Kempe might not have needed a scribe. Virginia Woolf notes that of the great authors she cites (Austen, both Brontës, and George Eliot) two were unmarried and all were childless (and of the great nineteenth century women authors, only Gaskell seems to have had a normal family life). In the case of Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to the author of Frankenstein, it was literally true that the creation of the author required the death of the mother. This is not the least of what Woolf means when she says that it is only the lives of ordinary women that can explain the rise of extraordinary words.