"I have to talk!" These 5 women are a bit strong

First hug you who have been a little hard lately.

The epidemic is fierce, oil prices are rising, stocks are falling, and funds are green.

Even the old altar sauerkraut noodles did not dare to eat casually.

It's easy to get frustrated and think about it:

"Am I still married in my thirties?"

"What should I do if I haven't become a little leader at the age of 28?"

"This year's high score spray spray to the national line can be rectified?"

What you don't know is that some people are almost forty years old before they start their own writing, and some people have seemingly ordinary short lives but are remembered by history.

Virginia Woolf once asked in an article titled The Art of Biography:

"Isn't it true that anyone who has lived and left a record of life deserves to be passed on?" Including those failures and successes, and those humble and prominent? What is greatness? What is smallness? We must change our standards of values and establish new heroes to look up to. ”

Lindell Gordon's "Game Breakers: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World" may be a clever response to the questions Woolf raised nearly a hundred years ago.

Her five women writers: Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and Woolf herself, all practice new standards, about the origins of writing, about the quality of life.

In this issue of "Yang Lan Reading", let's interpret this "Game Breaker" together

1

"Catastrophe" in the dark all night

The name "Game Breaker", at first glance, thought to be a spy novel, or a business biography, but in fact it tells the story of five "outsider" women.

Genius: Mary Shelley,6-year-old Mary fell in love with the poet Shelley without hesitation, even though he already had a family at the time. Mary and Shelley decide to elope.

Psychic: Emily Brontë on the surface, Emily's life was uneventful. She had a brief life in a mountain village far from London, and died at the age of thirty. She is upright and solemn, and wild and frank.

Outlaw: George Eliot wrote her first novel when she was thirty-seven, and it was only at the age of forty that she found her voice as a novelist.

Orator: Olive Schleiner in Marchsfontaine, the poetry of loneliness inspires her voice. Walking on Karoo, she felt a wild excitement and freedom.

Explorer: Virginia Woolf "twenty-nine, unmarried, a loser, childless, mentally insane, not a writer." Virginia complained to her sister.

Today's women are very dashing, living freely one by one, which was not the case before.

In nineteenth-century England, where they lived, it was all men's business to make money, travel, and do business.

Women were outsiders to mainstream education, what was the orthodox education that women received at that time?

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen writes:

"Women, singing and dancing, painting music, everything must be proficient, this is not enough, the expression posture, tone of voice, must have style ..."

Obviously, a woman who likes to read and has a mind is not welcome, and will be called "blue socks", which means that she lacks femininity and wants to compete with men in knowledge.

But the women in the book are all "outliers" who can't stand being outsiders. Although they cannot receive formal schooling like men, they are thirsty for knowledge and seek spiritual nourishment through reading and educate themselves.

They dare to go out of the house, show their faces, even support themselves, deal with the world like men, and experience a life they have never experienced before.

Because of this, they are discredited, displaced, and even betrayed, but they still bravely grope their voices in the shadows and contribute excellent works and great ideas to the world.

They walked alone in the dark, and finally broke the identity of outsiders and became the "game breakers" of that era.

2

Can't be obedient, can't be categorized

Gordon not only wrote the legendary lives of these five female writers with informative materials, but also found a "link" between them.

The origin of this bond is Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Feminist Defense has become a spiritual belief that spans almost an entire century.

The translator of the book described this lineage in the epilogue as follows:

As the first feminist thinker in history, Wollstonecraft's seminal ideas also run through the lives of the five writers in Gamebreaker.

Mary Shelley read her work The Defense of Feminism again and again at her mother's grave and practiced her prediction of the birth of the woman as a "new species." Eliot, Schreiner, and Woolf are also paying tribute in different ways to Wollstonecraft's tradition of thought.

Wollstonecraft advocated that women should develop themselves through education and reading, and believed that family nurturing and human emotional growth were indispensable components of the effective functioning of a society.

The female independence she advocates is not just a simple and crude copy of the legal rights of men in the political world, but to play the unique characteristics and potentials of women's nature and achieve true independence of consciousness and personality.

Her more nuanced political claims have been misinterpreted by later generations, especially as her dependence on passion and marriage in her personal life was seen as contrary to her advocacy of female independence in her writings, and worse, directly branded her as a slut.

But Gordon's biography has rescued Wollstonecraft from this historical burying and misinterpretation, and she believes that her charm lies precisely in "she can make mistakes."

She lives in an almost experimental way, exploring a life where intellect and passion coexist. "There is an unprecedented reality in her voice and actions, unable to conform to any standardized assumptions."

Wollstonecraft represents "a new species reading, experimenting, growing, but still unable to be categorized."

Sounds like a fun and unique soul, doesn't it?

The five writers in Gamebreaker are also inheritors of this tradition, whom Gordon calls "gamebreakers" because each of them has been squeezed into isolation at some point in their lives, if not most of the time, by violating some narrow absolute standard of value or political position.

In Shelley and Elliott, it was because of marriage and sexual morality; in Brontë and Woolf, it was because of their temperaments that were almost on the verge of morbidity; in Schreiner it was because she chose to be with the "enemy" in war.

They have also been misinterpreted, but Gordon unleashed their uncategorized nature from the "taming" of history.

Gordon said in the preface: "Actually, I can't say that I chose these writers, they chose themselves." Each of them embraced the impulse that Jane Eyre had expressed: "I have to speak."

What did they say? What darkest hours have they experienced? And what did you break the shackles and become a writer who has influenced generations?