Gossip as a Literary Genre, or Gossip as “L’Écriture feminine”?

Francesca Peacock roots through the archives for a deeper understanding of scandal and speech in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Francesca PeacockAugust 13, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Literary Criticism

• Gender & Sexuality

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print. And join us to celebrate Gossip’s release at our end-of-summer party on August 22.

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THERE’S A PASSAGE in Rachel Cusk’s motherhood memoir A Life’s Work that angers me every time I read it. Unlike many critics who were furious upon the book’s publication in 2001, I’m not annoyed by its descriptions of motherhood. I admire Cusk’s honesty about the pain and depersonalization entailed by pregnancy and childbirth; I admire it to the extent that it makes me recoil, makes me question whether I’ll ever be able to have a child, to endure the disintegration of individuality, time, and subjectivity distinct from what she terms the “motherbaby.”

In fact, the passage that infuriates me wasn’t even included in the book’s first publication; it was added afterwards, as part of Cusk’s response to backlash. Newspapers attacked the book—The Times claimed that “if everyone were to read [it], the propagation of the human race would virtually cease.” Others warned against the volume being given to pregnant women. It’s still discussed on online mothers’ forums today. Rare is the voice that defends it.

Confronted with all this criticism, Cusk wrote a new foreword in 2007 defending the difference between literature and life, fact and fiction. Her argument is one of aesthetic values over personal offense, delight in “individual discovery over the institutional representation, the vicissitudes of the personal over the dishonesty of the communal.” In response to the many women critics who reviewed her negatively, she writes: “I take this opportunity to issue a health warning to my own sex. This is not a childcare manual, ladies.”

What’s so infuriating about these two sentences? Is it their patronizing tone, the near-palpable dismissal contained in the word “ladies”? Is it the likelihood that no one has ever taken A Life’s Work as a childcare manual? Or perhaps Cusk’s self-conscious denigration of “her own sex”—a possible perversion of Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous declaration in A Vindication of the Rights of Women: “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures”?

Rational creature that I am, these reasons alone aren’t enough to bring about anger. There’s something else added on top. In momentarily speaking exclusively to “her own sex,” Cusk seems to be opening her book up to a female group readership. But just as quickly as she issues that invitation, she rescinds it with her irony and condescension. She affirms that hers is a book about a personal experience, and thus denies it a collective readership, or wider possibilities of reflection.

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Cusk came across as radical in the 21st century. She was going where few memoir writers had gone before, at least ostensibly: into a world of sleep deprivation, diaper changes, and the taboo of ambiguous—even negative—feelings about motherhood. Yet as early as the mid-17th century, a woman writer was sending up a society that made women delight in pregnancy: she describes those women “taking a Pride in their great Bellies”; faking a bodily exhaustion and a “rasping”; and spending all their energy, and money, amassing “Fine and Costly Childbed-Linnen, Swadling-Cloths, Mantles […] fine Beds, Cradles, Baskets.” In many ways, these playful, verging-on-the-catty remarks could have been written by Cusk—who, in one passage of A Life’s Work, moves to a university town and rails against the type of “good” mothers she finds there with “dumpy flowered dresses and thick white arms.”

What’s different, though, is the former’s relationship to her readers: the author—the poet, philosopher, playwright, and scientist Margaret Cavendish—works in the epistolary form, addressing each letter to a fictional recipient. “Madam,” she writes, before divulging anecdotes, stories, and personal details about women she lightly anonymizes, referring to them only by their initials (“Th’ other day the Lady S. M. was to Visit me”). Rather than one woman railing against the foibles of her sex—a lonely outpost of reason—Cavendish thereby constructs, and includes herself in, an imagined group of women doing something subtly different. Corresponding as a collective, these (fictional) women are reacting to what women are forced to do, the way they are expected to act and behave, the strictures—biological, social, and otherwise—placed upon their lives. In Sociable Letters (1664), this response takes the form of epistles; in The Convent of Pleasure (1668), a play, Cavendish has a group of women take this one step further: they act out the horrors of childbirth and marriage for each other’s benefit; the drama becomes a group spectacle. But there’s another term, of course, for Cavendish’s written and performed exchanges of stories and information: gossip.

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Ancrene Wisse is a monastic manual composed in the early 13th century. Anonymously authored, it was penned for three sisters, young women who had all decided to become “anchoresses.” Anchoresses (like anchorites, their male cousins) took the ascetic dedication of the nun or monk one step further. More than merely cloistered away from the world in a convent or monastery—alone, but alone as part of a community—anchoresses were enclosed: bricked into small cells attached to a given church or cathedral, and left to remain there for the rest of their lives. It was death to the world; the consecration of their enclosure borrows passages, word for word, from medieval funeral rites. The women were granted three slit-like windows: one through which to see services in the adjoining church, one through which to pass their food and bodily waste, and one through which to admit light from the outside world. Anchoresses spent their days in prayer and contemplation, praying their way through the services of the daily office and reading religious literature.

It was only natural that anyone left so isolated—anchoresses only enjoyed contact with the servants who looked after their physical needs—would fight the temptation to talk to outsiders. The temptation was made worse by the fact that, given their reputation for spirituality, anchoresses gained an additional reputation for wisdom—for harboring the kind of sage advice that was of immense value to the free-roaming, worldly population. Yet among the reams and reams of advice given to anchoresses in the Ancrene Wisse, much of it steeped in a near-pathological fear of sin (everything could be sinful, even an excess of prayer), is a tirade against chatter:

Me seith upon ancren, thet euch meast haveth an ald cwene to feden hire earen, a meathelilt the meatheleth hire alle the talen of the lond, a rikelot the cakeleth al thet ha sith ant hereth, swa thet me seith i bisahe: “From mulne ant from chepinge, from smiththe ant from ancre-hus me tidinge bringeth.”

They say about anchoresses that each has to have an old woman to feed her ears: a jabberer who jabbers to her all the stories of the area, a magpie who cackles out all that she sees and hears, so that it is said in a proverb “From mill and from market, from smithy and from anchor-house, people bring the news.” (trans. Hugh White)

Just a few sentences later, the anchoresses’ anonymous guide—or censor—repeats his fears. It is “not likely,” he writes, that an anchoress could have “a mouth of this kind” (that is, the mouth of a chatterer), “but it may be greatly feared that she sometimes bends her ear to such mouths.”

Is it fair to express surprise over the censor’s gendering of this specific, sinful type of speech? This is, after all, a guide directed at women. Still, his insistence that gossip—“all the stories of the area,” “all that [a person] sees and hears”—is exclusively female in purview, dominated by old women and, in the translation, magpies who take she/her pronouns, is rather grating. It’s of the same order as the oft-repeated fact about the etymology of “gossip”: stemming from “god” and “sibb” (in the sense of “sibling”), the term initially only meant a relation or friend, before it was deployed only to refer to female friends, eventually mutating into its meaning today. “Gossip,” it seems, has always had misogynistic connotations.

The fear, in Ancrene Wisse, is not only of news spreading in an unholy way but also of the anchoresses producing anything. The prohibition against these women talking or spreading news is reflected in the fact that much of the manual is dedicated to telling them to spend their days reading, but never writing. They are to absorb information, but never spread it; they are vessels to hold knowledge, but never to share.

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It’s worth using a working definition here. Like real-world gossip, literary gossip reveals truths that are normally hidden, the sort of information that is spoken about—when it’s spoken about—in hushed tones. I’m using “gossip” without its negative connotations: it’s personal writing, either about its author and their family or about other lives they know intimately; it’s writing that pushes the margins of what is acceptable to reveal, writing that is more (seemingly) open, writing that leaves its author vulnerable on the page. Crucially, it’s writing that is aware of a readership—the recipient of a letter, the dedicatee of a memoir, or even just the author rereading their own diary. This conspiratorial nature seems to define the genre, however mass-published a given work is; it’s an affirmation of personal experience or secrets, combined with an awareness that these will become (at least semi)public.

It’s a genre that includes everything from the chatty, revealing letters between the 18th-century Queen of England, Anne, and her beloved friend Sarah Churchill all the way through to Cusk’s A Life’s Work (hopefully by now, my distaste at her dismissal of her audience makes sense). It extends from Cusk’s later divorce memoir, Aftermath (2012) to the Regency-era courtesan Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs (1825) to Margery Kempe’s extraordinary, near-psychedelic 15th-century spiritual autobiography; from contemporary autofiction to letters exchanged by medieval women like the Paston or Stonor families. It’s a genre that, in the hands of Annie Ernaux, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. The ability of some of these works to create real-world gossip—when the Duke of Wellington heard that Harriette Wilson intended to print her memoirs recounting their time together, he allegedly replied, “Publish and be damned”; when 15th-century gentlewoman Margaret Paston wrote a letter about how much she disapproved of her daughter’s marriage, it began a long saga of family outrage—is not an essential requirement of the genre. Many works of literary gossip never provoked light-hearted chatter, much less opprobrium—they’ve rarely been encountered outside the archive.

To that end, “gossip” isn’t a genre that comes easily. Historically, a lot of personal writing has never been considered literature: never printed, anthologized, analyzed; sometimes very rarely read. The irony is palpable: we live in an era of life-writing, in which memoirs and autofiction dominate review space and literary discussions both inside and outside academia, but very little life-writing from previous centuries is regularly read or considered. And that which dates to before the 20th century and is deemed “canonical”—I’m thinking of Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1665), Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), or William Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850)—is almost exclusively male.

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In her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous issues a call to action: for women to write, and to write in ways that are true to themselves and, by extension, to their gender. Cixous asks:

And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven). Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is, for “great men”; and it’s “silly.”

In these pages, Cixous gave birth to the term “écriture feminine,” a type of literature women “must write through their bodies.” For her, such literature meant inventing an “impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes”—and, in doing so, “inscribe femininity.”

There’s something here that, to modern readers, comes across as essentialist: few women writers I know like to be told that their writing is inviolably marked as “feminine” (or, in Cixous’s words, “female-sexed”). Really, though, Cixous is calling for a new mode of personal writing—for freedom from the constraints enacted through Ancrene Wisse. She’s calling for writing of bodies, of selves—she’s calling, in effect, for gossip.

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Cixous’s cry was for new writing. Her analysis of historical writing is painfully slim: she identifies only Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet as writing ecriture feminine. But could paying greater attention to gossip as a genre help us access historical women’s voices too?

So far I’ve mentioned literary works of varying fame, most of which can be found in shops or online, printed, published, and packaged as books. In the early modern period, though, print publication was accompanied by another form of dissemination—manuscript circulation. It can be all too easy to apply contemporary frameworks to historical writing, to assume that print was the privileged means of dissemination, simply because our contemporary culture now believes so. But, as scholars—among them Margaret Ezell and her brilliant book Writing Women’s Literary History (1993)—have demonstrated, this is a fallacy. Manuscript circulation was a decidedly public form of writing in the early modern period (John Donne’s work, for example, was only printed after his death, but was well known in his lifetime), and a form of publication that was more open to women.

Let’s turn to the spiritual diary, or autobiography, of Mary Whitelocke, a puritan woman who lived and wrote in 17th-century England. Whitelocke lived through a dramatic period of political and religious upheaval, when debates over worship could spill from books into state decrees, and political pamphlets had a role to play in the fall of the monarchy. Yet where John Milton and Andrew Marvell turned their pens to political change and biblical history, Whitelocke looked elsewhere. She wrote directly to her son Samuel as he approached adulthood, describing how she “did very offen greif and morne for the want of children in this life.” Her memoir, in which she passes years wanting a child and at one point endures a miscarriage, is largely one of her infertility. It’s a curious, fascinating document. Whitelocke is open about her pain, believing it heaven-sent—from God who “did mingle our cup with some bitterness” lest the couple be too happy—all the while addressing the child whose arrival marked the end of that pain. It’s a work steeped, for both mother and son, in gratitude; it’s also a remarkable demonstration of the way that 17th-century thought, and the Puritan mindset specifically, accommodated infertility.

Does it feel odd to apply “gossip” to a text this intimate, and this sad? For all the levity implied by the name, literary gossip can be and often is a serious genre: Whitelocke’s text is as open and powerful as Maggie Nelson’s description, in The Argonauts (2015), of the difficulty she and her partner Harry experienced trying to conceive (“Insemination after insemination, wanting our baby to be”). But whereas Nelson’s book was lauded upon its release, historical women’s writing on intimate, often unsavory details has broadly been ignored. Anthologies of poetry from the early modern period typically include five or six “Country House” poems, yet rarely Lady Mary Carey’s on her own miscarriage: “What birth is this: a poore despissed creature? / A little Embrio; voyd of life, and feature.”

Mary Carey was, at least, writing poetry, a genre that has the dignity of being certainly literary. What about the unknown woman of one manuscript in London’s Wellcome Collection? In MS.7391, a woman whose name has been lost to history painstakingly recorded the remedies she used when ministering to the women of her family and those in the surrounding areas: “I gave it [an “ointment”] to a woman of Burton who went on crutches.” She aided these women in times of emergency, recording what she tried for posterity, and for future needs: in times of a “flux in childbed,” or to “clear the body after childbirth.” This one woman is part of a whole choir of others; medical recipe books—complete with annotations about how the recipes have been used—are some of the most common early modern texts to bear the touch of women’s pens and brains. They were often books owned by generations of women—passed down from mother to daughter when a girl married and was preparing to look after children of her own, or even as a marriage gift, from mother-in-law to new bride.

Gossip as a literary genre is a way of taking these stories, and the language in which they are written, seriously.

But for all the intellectual side, I can’t deny a certain emotional pull I feel towards these texts. I think I’m addicted to the thrill of reading something so personal, so intimate. The new surname of a married signature rewritten on a page three or four times, or a marginal note to a recipe, have me far more interested than a diligent copy of a well-known poem. I can spend (and have) whole days reconstructing potential family trees from the names women wrote so proudly in the front of leather-bound books, the names they grew more confident in writing as the pages went on. I have spent whole days, too, guessing at the identities of those who didn’t even write in the books, those who borrowed them to make marks that practice and gesture at handwriting. I get intoxicated, I think, by the fact that these words were initially written for such a small group. And, if I’m honest, I get intoxicated further by the fact that they are now so little known. As a literary voyeur, I am part of a new small group reading these pages. Am I culpable of another critical sin here—rather than not engaging with these texts because they are personal, have I put them on a pedestal for their intimacy instead?

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There’s a passage in The Argonauts that suggests Nelson’s own anxiety surrounding gossip and its status in literature. She describes reading an interview with Anne Carson in which the poet “answers certain questions—the boring ones? the too personal ones?—with empty brackets [[ ]].”

It’s not surprising to encounter such a denial of personality in writing from Carson, who has, at different times, characterized her creative process as “an ongoing struggle […] to get every Me out of the way” and declared that her “personal poetry is a failure.” But Nelson’s written response is surprising. She tells her readers that “the sight of Carson’s brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table.” In a writer so known for her ability to alchemize the stuff of families, embodiment, and personhood into compelling literary and theoretical meditations, Carson’s comment still engendered a sense of embarrassment.

In some ways, it’s easy to argue that we’re witnessing today the ascendancy of gossip as a literary genre. But for every triumph of declaration and intrigue, of putting one’s cards on the table—Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024), say—there’s another essay or podcast railing against personal writing. In February, a review by a UK-based journalist accused Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection No Judgment of spending too much space discussing, in the journalist’s words, “so-called autofiction.” And Joyce Carol Oates’s designation of “wan little husks” needs no introduction. For women’s historical writing, the disparity is even clearer: I am not the first to note that as scholars and academics turn to historic women’s writing, it is only the most palatable works—often women’s novels from the 18th century onwards—that are included in most anthologies. The messier, more personal writing is left behind in the archives. Even in the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, only four authors are included from before the 16th century. For the rest of the early modern period, the overwhelming bulk of material is published poetry—that which fits into a more traditional canon—rather than texts in manuscript. The tone of dismissal in these attacks—or the act of dismissal in noninclusion and nonprinting—is one of insignificance, as if the personal did not matter as much as the author believed it did.

This stems, I think, from the fact that some critics and readers take gossip to be preeminently, obviously, true—true to the extent that this a real reflection of the life of the author, not a mediated literary product. It’s a belief that sees the author disappear, become a cipher for their experiences, with the intermediary stage of their typing or writing all but forgotten about. It’s something that Rachel Cusk, in her retaliatory introduction to A Life’s Work, puts her finger on when she writes that the difference between “the struggle of living” and “the struggle of writing” is the “quality of fabrication.” It’s something, too, that Maggie Nelson writes about when she taps into the idea of writing that “dramatizes”: “[I]f I insist that there is a persona or a performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself in my writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me.”

Writing about the personal need not mean that the writer is not an author, that their work is less worthy of attention. There is always an act of creation, of generation, in taking lived experience and forming it into words.

This distinction is, if anything, even more important for writers of past centuries. Those who never had the chance to publish their writing, to wear the mask of a professional writer, a mask that covers—and elevates—their personal experience. The denial of personal writing as literary creation doesn’t just malign their work; it also erases them as authors: there’s a reason that names like Mary Whitelocke and Mary Carey—or the many women who wrote private letters and diaries—remain largely unknown. Or that the anonymous women addressed in Ancrene Wisse—who were told never to write, not even to talk—left behind no trace. Gossip as a genre is not something lighthearted or ephemeral; at least, it need not necessarily be. It’s a way of paying attention to personal writing across the centuries, of honoring what happens when women turn life into literature and speak rather than remain silent.

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Featured image: Alfred Stieglitz. Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin, 1889. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Art Institute of Chicago (1949.698). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed August 9, 2024. Image has been cropped.