Resurrecting women

After farewell drinks on my last night in London before I moved to Paris, I was giddy on the London underground, my head full of feathers and soft objects, and I struck up a conversation with a random passenger, as I’m prone to do.

We both had books under our arms – what are you reading? I was reading one of Anais Nin’s journals, pink and fleshy, and full of desire. "Hey" I said, popping open with enthusiasm, "why don’t we exchange books, we could start a thing where random strangers exchange random books on the tube. Simple, here i'll have yours and you have mine."

I’ve always been against the idea of books treated as stagnant objects, left on shelves, sometimes unread or only knowing one reader. French wrapped his books in plastic and half-opened them when he read them to protect the pages from germs, only catching the words on the left side of each page. He used to harangue me about my well-travelled books, covers crumpled and words sweating off the pages. Your books are bringing down the value of our bookshelf.

When I moved from Sydney to London I left several boxes of peeling books with my friend and said "read them!" I probably could have stored them in my parents' attic, but for me books are meant to be read, to circulate, not left to gather mould on a shelf, and certainly not to be burnt at 451 degrees farenheit.

But despite all my enthusiasm for the book exchange on the London tube, the next day I slightly regretted the swap. I’d been right into the epic proportions of the love story between John Erskine and Anais Nin and here I was with a waif of a novel, a size zero. I put it aside and forgot about it.

But earlier this week, drinking pansy wine in a bar full of empty chairs, with purple-stained mouth I was lamenting to a friend that all the novels in my top ten (which doesn’t actually contain ten novels) are by dead men. I love women’s politics and history, their philosophy and their religion. I love their journals when they talk about the process of writing fiction (and the process of sleeping with other writers) but why don’t I like their fiction? I’m a woman. I like my fiction.

You should read Jean Rhys, my friend suggested. And he reeled me in with her Paris novels. A 30-something woman in the 1920 somethings, drinking and ageing, elbowing out all those men who were standing at the bar novelising about being down and out in Paris.

And I remembered that the book I received on the tube exchange was Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea and I found it dying on my book shelf last night and resurrected it. According to the little biography at the start of the book, after a brief success with her novels about Paris and London, Jean Rhys disappeared for about 27 years (although I'm sure that this plunge into obscurity, the 20 odd years of death attributed to her by the men who gave awards and published, were in fact living, working years for her) and was "re-discovered" with a stack of short stories, and then Wide Sargasso Sea.

I read it last night. It isn't underfed - it's a natural waif, starting and ending in exactly the right place. I guess what drew me in was its unsettling balance between plot and style, something I’m trying to achieve in my own writing at the moment. She pushes us to the outskirts of language, we're happily sinking into the fragrant marshes of her beautiful style, and then she beseeches us to follow the plot again because it is going to take another twist: someone is dead, someone is going to have sex with the maid, someone is going to perform some black magic.

But best of all after reading it, I felt inspired. To write, to speak, to do everything. And now I’ll happily let the book go on the Paris metro, for anyone who has a book to exchange.