A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs is a memoir interwoven with essays on the lives of eight of the greatest (women) writers of Western literature. As a premise, for self-styled flaneuses with a literary bent, it seems a no-brainer. Surely, we’ll all love this book.
And there’s much to like. The essays, on the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft and Toni Morrison, are basic, but often extremely interesting. It’s a relief to recall how late the careers of some of these women started (Morrison, George Eliot), and to be reminded anew that, actually, canonical women writers suffered too, had self-doubt too, met some blisteringly awful men, too. It’s as though, by normalising their lives, we might feel akin to the ordinariness, rather than daunted by their extraordinary achievements.
Yet this dethroning is problematic. Each chapter is given the subject’s first name as a title: “Virginia”, “Sylvia”, “Toni”, as though these women who changed history are just our pals, popping round for wine. This signifies the tone throughout, as Biggs uses each chapter-essay to link their lives with her own struggles, most movingly the death of her mother.
It’s when she writes of her difficulty in attending Oxford as a middle-class person rather than an upper-middle-class person, that it’s difficult to find sympathy. Similarly, it’s hard to feel much about the main autobiographical thread that runs throughout the book, the divorce she instigated, after which she cried in her bath in London, dated, held Ferrante appreciation evenings, then moved to New York to start afresh. Despite the numerous revelations of millennial thinking (some of the authors “disappoint” her, as when Eliot isn’t more vocal in her support of women’s suffrage; or when Zora Neale Hurston, apparently, didn’t write about race; as well as when she shoehorns in her own definition of what a “woman” is), the reading experience of this book is one of witnessing, uncomfortably, someone utterly unaware of their privilege.
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Privilege is not, in most situations, an issue, or worth noting (it doesn’t matter, when reading Woolf, Wilde or Waugh). But as this memoir is consciously shaped to create a sense of empathetic commonality between us, Biggs and women such as Simone de Beauvoir, here it leaves a bad taste.
