Lorna Sage completed this collection of critical writing shortly before her untimely death in January of this year. Moments of Truth concentrates on women writers, mainly from the first half of the 20th century, and is intended as a companion to Sage's book on post-war women novelists, Women in the House of Fiction (1992).
Considering that the collection is sifted from pieces that appeared in the 1990s in a variety of publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, scholarly journals and introductions to new editions of modern classics, the whole hangs together surprisingly well.
Sage was professor of English at East Anglia University, but her prose is mercifully free of academic jargon. She writes with clear intelligence and a certain tartness. While familiar with gender studies, feminist criticism and the wilder shores of deconstructionism, she is not, apparently, impressed; time and again she returns to the text itself, and beside the text, the life. This is writerly criticism - down to earth, incisive, peppered with memorable phrases - and it makes exhilirating reading.
Most of the pieces were produced while Sage was working on her memoir, Bad Blood (2000), which won the Whitbread Award for biography. The title, Moments of Truth, refers both to the modernist "epiphany", and to the moment when each writer discovers her voice and finds her calling. Echoes of Virginia Woolf's phrase "Moments of Being" are also intended, but the emphasis is very much on writing as work, and writing as part of the woman writer's life. As Marina Warner remarks in her spirited and affectionate introduction, "you can't have the work without the life, or, more pointedly, the life without the work, nor the work or the life without the art".
Sage's pantheon opens with Edith Wharton, who described her relief on her 1899 debut as a writer: "Thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job," and concludes with a study of Angela Carter's annus mirablilis, 1979, in which she published both The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman. In between, Sage considers Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Christina Stead, Djuna Barnes, Violet Trefusis, Jane Bowles, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Brooke-Rose and Iris Murdoch. Certain key concepts create a kind of unity among the chosen. Jane Bowles's definition of being "serious" - which, according to Sage, "meant risking the possibility that you were meaninglessly weird, an existential Calamity Jane" - is one feature shared by this small company of women modernists. Originality, praised in male writers, became weirdness when practised by women.
Consider the seriousness of Angela Carter in The Sadeian Woman: "If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind." Simone de Beauvoir is viewed not as a realist but as an iconoclast and a utopian - Sage calls her "an anti-realist" and speaks of her "negative originality", arguing that it was in The Second Sex rather than the novels that she realised her project most fully. Sage speaks of de Beauvoir's achievement therein as "uncreating mythical woman".
Throughout, Sage emphasises the interplay between the life and the work, concentrating on the territory where fiction meets memory. The novel as work of art is less important than writing as an honest witness to human experience. Warner refers to the rise of the genre known as "life-writing", which took place while Sage was working on these pieces, exemplified by the unclassifiable work of her colleague at East Anglia, W.G. Sebald. Warner quotes critic Adam Phillips's remark: "Today we value truthfulness, not truth". More than anything it is their aspiration to truthfulness that unites Sage's 12 writers with each other, and, in turn, with Lorna Sage herself.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic