There used to be a cartoon parody of the ascent of man. It featured a woman down on her knees scrubbing a floor and took her through various developmental stages till she walked away upright, besuited, and toting a briefcase. Cumbrian writer and feminist, Margaret Forster takes a similar approach in this examination of wifehood over a 156-year period. Her ascent of the wife goes from martyr to nursemaid to political ally to, well, herself.
This is not exactly foreign territory to Forster; at least two of her previous non-fiction works, Hidden Lives and Precious Lives, examine wider societal questions through the prism of her own and her family's experiences. It's fair to say however, that all the many roles of women, and particularly the wifely and the domestic, have attracted Forster's repeated examination both in her novels and her non-fiction work.
Good Wives? promises more of the same. In it, Forster sets out to examine the lives of three wives - Livingstone, wife of sometime missionary doctor and explorer David Livingstone, Fanny Stevenson, wife of writer Robert Louis Stevenson and Jennie Lee, wife of Labour MP Aneurin (Nye) Bevan. At the end of each mini-biography, Forster includes a chapter entitled Reflections in which she meditates on her own experiences as a wife - she married journalist and author Hunter Davies in 1960 - and draws some conclusions about how the nature of the role has changed over a century and a half.
Mary Livingstone came from a time when "to honour and obey" were the chief wifely directives. By far the most harrowing life in the book, poor pregnant Mary traipsed (children in tow) all over Africa, literally through hell and high water, pestilence and disease, in the wake of her husband.
An undemanding sort, all she wanted to be was a homemaker. But Livingstone was a flibbertigibbet, and much though he loved his wife, he was always wanting to up stakes and find better natives to convert or a more interesting river to navigate.
In 1862, while moored on the banks of the Zambezi, Mary fell ill with fever and was housed in a tent. Livingstone only thought to ask his explorer pals to vacate the relative comfort of a nearby stone house when it became clear that Mary was in her final agony. She died in bed, but only just. She was broken by hardship and childbearing and putting up.
The next wife on the evolutionary scale is Fanny Stevenson, an argumentative, assertive Indiana girl who had enough backbone to leave an early unsuccessful marriage and in 1880, married Robert Louis Stevenson who was as much in need of a nurse as a wife. Stevenson suffered from a chronic lung disease and Fanny spent the next 14 years travelling the world with him in search of a climate which would give him the best chance of longevity.
Along the way, her own ambitions to be an artist and writer were sidelined despite the fact she believed herself Stevenson's equal in all but genius. As with David Livingstone, Stevenson benefitted greatly by the fact of Fanny's existence. She in turn, gained nothing but his love and approval, and in the end, only managed to extend his life to the age of 44.
The most evolved of the historical wives examined by Forster is Jennie Lee. A free-spirited working class girl, she grew up with her face set firmly against marriage, children and housekeeping. In the 1929 so-called Flapper Election, she became an Independent Labour MP and later formed a relationship with fellow Labour MP Nye Bevan, marrying him merely to prevent gossip marring their careers. Despite believing she could have it all, and unhampered by motherhood, Lee soon discovered that the magnificently ascendant political career of Bevan, Minister for Health and Housing in Attlee's post-war government, must take precedence over her own.So, another story of shifting goal posts and accommodations reached.
In the preface to this book Forster informs us that she is setting out to find "What is a wife? Who is 'good'?" Well, of course she answers neither of these flaccid, lazy questions and her subjective, nay selective, unfurling of her own marriage strikes a real dud note.
As it turns out she never got Hunter out of bed to minister to crying children, if she had to be away from home she left him frozen dinners, and she overlooked it when, against her wishes, he purchased an investment property using their combined savings. Astonishingly, she follows an analysis of Fanny Stevenson's ministrations to her seriously ill husband with a story about the time Hunter got a boil on his bum.
In the main, Forster's argument seems to be that marriage and Hunter didn't hold her back. Implicit in all of this is the Nigella Lawsonesque imperative "And you can do it too!". The problem though, is that Forster's thesis only proves that for one middle-class, middle-earning couple, both writers, the husband's career did not retard the wife's. Tellingly, like the three meticulously researched and well-told biographies in this book, we find out so much more about what Margaret did for Hunter, than what Hunter himself brought to the bargain.
Fundamentally problematic to the premise of this book is, how is one to assess the equality of any relationship without an examination of the latter? That women have now discovered "having it all" really means "doing it all" is scandalously overlooked by Forster. That the feminist agenda in the West has scarcely succeeded beyond issues of birth control, employment and finance, and has not even begun in many parts of the world (remember the Taliban), does not even raise a blip on Forster's comfy radar.
Around 1819 the poet Byron wrote in Don Juan, "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart/ Tis woman's whole existence". Margaret Forster's tome scarcely advances the argument one jot.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist and critic