The Invisible Woman – review | Mark Kermode

Felicity Jones as Nelly Ternan in the 'chilly but engaging' The Invisible Woman. Photograph: David Appleby

Ralph Fiennes may be the director and star of this handsomely mounted tale of the private life of Charles Dickens, but it's Felicity Jones who makes it fly. She plays Nelly Ternan, a young actress of indeterminate talent who captures the author's eye and heart, but wrestles (philosophically, morally, practically) with the idea of becoming his mistress.

The Invisible WomanProduction year: 2013Countries: UK, USA Runtime: 111 minsDirectors: Ralph FiennesCast: Felicity Jones, Kristin Scott Thomas, Michelle Fairley, Ralph Fiennes, Tom HollanderMore on this film

Seen in flashback from the perspective of the now married Nelly, tormented by the memories of her affair, the story unfolds in chilly but engaging fashion, with Abi Morgan's typically insightful script taking its lead from Claire Tomalin's book.

At the heart of Nelly's dilemma is a gender inequality that Morgan's screenplay lays bare; the progressive "freedom" from marriage that Dickens and cohort Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) merrily espouse is a liberty for men only.

Expressing much while often saying little, Jones proves once again to be a mesmerising screen presence, a performer behind whose face you can see the most complex and subtle thought processes at work. Accordingly, Fiennes keeps his direction restrained, concentrating on small moments rather than grand gestures to powerful effect.

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A DIFFICULT WOMAN: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

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May 4, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Alice Kessler-Harris
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1596913639
439 pages
$30

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In this friendly if far from uncritical biography, Alice Kessler-Harris focuses on Lillian Hellman as a woman both of her time and ahead of her time. She was "a woman among men" who "became the economically successful playwright and celebrity she was by blurring gender boundaries." Born in 1905 in New Orleans, she "reached beyond southern tradition and turned into a misfit, becoming in the eyes of all around her a difficult woman." Her life tells us "how complicated it must have been for a woman in the deepest part of the twentieth century to stay true to her desires even as she juggled the pressures of the world around her." Nearly seven decades after her birth, participating in a panel discussion about the "condition of woman today," she "could not fully identify with the modern version of women's liberation" but insisted on going her own way:

"By herself, through hard work and talent, she had achieved money, status, and fame in her lifetime and by her own hand. She was a self-made woman. Her capacity to live freely - her sexual liberation, her personal freedom - rested on the economic foundation she built for herself. Young women, she thought, could choose to emulate her unorthodox lifestyle - to emulate her capacity 'to walk out if somebody insults me' - only if they were economically independent. But the younger generation of women reserved their adulation for her style. They admired her brash and outspoken stance, her ability to smoke and to swear and above all her courage in living by her own rules of personal conduct. 'I was so bored. I got so nasty,' she told an interviewer about that famous panel. 'Nobody seemed to be talking about economics.'"

What this suggests, to me at least, is that Hellman may ultimately prove more interesting and important as a figure than as a writer. Much celebrated from the 1930s until her death in 1984 for her plays, notably "The Little Foxes" and "The Children's Hour," and for her highly fictionalized volumes of autobiography, she seems now to be slowly fading from the literary scene. In part that is because, her writing skills to the contrary notwithstanding, she was more a middlebrow than a literary writer, and in larger part because her work has dated quickly. Among American playwrights of the 20th century she scarcely ranks with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, or for that matter even with the resolutely middlebrow Arthur Miller. Her memoirs - "An Unfinished Woman," "Pentimento," "Scoundrel Time" - remain in print, but they long ago lost the immediacy that drew so many readers to them, women most especially.

It is also to the point that fairly or not, her reputation as a human being has suffered terribly in the three decades since her death. "How had it happened," Kessler-Harris asks, "that Lillian Hellman, once so honored and famous, admired for her blunt and plainspoken style, had become the archetype of hypocrisy, the quintessential liar, the embodiment of ugliness? How was it that she was so widely remembered as a rigid Stalinist, an angry woman, a greedy, self-aggrandizing individual in a world where so many others had committed many of the same sins?" One obvious explanation is the fierce (and fiercely quotable) attack that Mary McCarthy launched against her in 1979. She said: "Lillian Hellman, I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer. Every word she says is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

Coming as they did from a writer whom I now find even more overrated than Hellman, those words probably should not have stung as deeply as they did. They drove Hellman around the bend, launching her on a legal action against McCarthy that ended inconclusively, doing no credit to either participant. Beyond that, it is true that Hellman remained a loyal Stalinist well after the tyranny and mass bloodshed of his regime had been conclusively disclosed, that she was given to explosive outbursts of anger and to melodramatic posturing and that she squeezed every nickel until it bled. Her posthumous reputation is not without justification.

Yet Kessler-Harris - a highly regarded historian who teaches history at Columbia University - sees Hellman as having been nurtured from childhood in "lessons of honesty, integrity, justice, and decency," concepts that "remained the heart and soul of American culture and of the life she would construct for herself." She sees Hellman as a principled moralist who could not resist the pulpit: "That she proclaimed her moral principles loudly - in her plays and her memoirs and at every public opportunity - must have irked friends and enemies alike. She fully earned the labels of self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement that her critics leveled at her." Had she not insisted on flinging these moral principles in the face of everyone who crossed her path, she doubtless would not have made as many enemies as she did.

She was a strange and often self-contradictory person. Though she is now regarded as an emblematic figure of the feminist revolution, she was caustic about feminist ideologues and often preferred to adopt a "masculine pose," one influenced by her long, if off-and-on, relationship with Dashiell Hammett: "Like Hammett (and such other 1930s figures as Hemingway and Faulkner), she drank, smoked, and partied nonstop. ... Nor did she make a secret of her sexual liaisons: she approached men she desired aggressively and slept with them at will. Quickly she earned a reputation as a 'she-Hammett.' But she wanted to be manly in another way, too, by exhibiting qualities of courage and forcefulness, by refusing to back down from a fight. These qualities contributed to her reputation as a stubborn woman, a difficult woman, a fighter."

That her political convictions were sincere and heartfelt is beyond question, but she was naive and credulous. Like many real or fancied American intellectuals during the 1930s she fell under the sway of communism, joining the Communist Party in 1938 "after the worst of the Moscow purge trials and in full awareness of them." Over the years she was variously depicted as a "known communist" or a "fellow traveler" or an "unrepentant Stalinist," which Kessler-Harris chooses to view as "less about Hellman's beliefs and practices than about the public mindset from which they emerged," i.e., McCarthyism and the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. There is some truth to this, but Hellman's stubborn refusal to re-examine her youthful beliefs in the light of compelling evidence against them does not speak well of her. Her famous appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1952 was indeed something of a triumph for her, but it was more rhetorical than anything else.

Kessler-Harris is right to argue that the life Hellman led "illuminates the world she confronted," most importantly the worlds of emerging women and of political fear and contention. Hellman's insistence on economic liberation and self-sufficiency was sound, and more realistic than the fuzzy ideology that so many feminists embraced. If only she had been able to keep a lid on her explosive temper and the "pain and anger" that set it off, she might have carved a prominent place for herself not merely in the history of American women but in American history itself. As it is she is at best a marginal figure, interesting for the details of her own life (too many of which constitute little more than the higher gossip), much less so for the work that made her briefly famous. Her day is done.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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‘That Woman’: Wallis Simpson revealed

By Anne Sebba Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Wallis Simpson — why ever are we talking about "that woman" after all these years?

Blame Madonna, whose new movie, W.E., is about her. Or blame the new stage drama in London The Last of the Duchess, and the new novel Abdication set during the crisis. And blame the new biographies, including That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, by British writer Anne Sebba.

PHOTOS: The life of 'That Woman' - Wallis Simpson

In contrast to most British assessments of Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, this book is clear-sighted unsentimental about but relatively sympathetic to the woman for whom King Edward VIII gave up his throne in 1936, shaking Britain and its royal family to the core.

And amazingly, after 75 years, there is new material to assess. Sebba has gained access to previously unexamined Simpson letters that reveal more about who she was, her fears and regrets during the abdication crisis, how she tried to prevent it and the marriage, and how she was nearly destroyed when the "romance of the century" was near universally condemned.

Simpson, in Sebba's telling, was misunderstood. The ridiculous things said and believed about her at the time would curl hair, and some of it came from the king's family. It was his sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who contemptuously dubbed her "that woman."

Sebba's book suggests Wallis would have been unsuitable as a queen even if she hadn't been a rather plain, 40-year-old, twice-divorced American with a brittle manner and harsh speaking voice, who looked like a man and was too old to bear children.

Simpson emerges in these pages as chic but also selfish, self-pitying and shallow. She was oblivious about what it actually meant to be the consort of a king in a constitutional monarchy. She thought, for example, that British kings could do what they wanted and no one could stop them. Wrong.

As President Kennedy's London-based sister once described her, Simpson was a crashing bore. She rarely thought seriously about anything except her next party, her next purchase of couture clothes or statement jewelry, her next cocktail. Her life after abdication was an endless effort to fend off ennui in the aimless, parasitic exile she shared with her little ex-king husband, now known as the Duke of Windsor.

But here's the sympathetic part: The ex-king was even worse than Wallis. He was a golden Prince of Wales, but it turned out he didn't actually want to be king. He became so insanely obsessed with Simpson — for reasons even his friends at the time could not understand — that he abandoned his duty, his family (especially his stuttering younger brother who had to take his place) and his country. Indignant that everyone was furious at him, he spent the rest of his life in querulous conflict with his family over the trifling (to an American) debate of whether Wallis should receive an HRH (Her Royal Highness) in her title. She never got it; he never got over it.

Wallis is the relatively rational one in this ditzy duo. Sebba documents that Wallis didn't want the king to abdicate and didn't want to marry him, even tried to break it off with him, in part because she still loved her second husband, Ernest Simpson. Even during the honeymoon she continued to write lovingly to Ernest, referring to her new, third husband as "Peter Pan" for his petulant personality.

But Peter Pan threatened suicide if she left him, and after he abdicated, Wallis was stuck with him. As Sebba reads it, Wallis was trapped, by a situation of her own making, for 36 years until the duke died. She survived another 14 years, spending most of that time barely conscious and bedridden in her Paris mansion.

How's that for a "great romance"?

Sebba dispenses with the silly stuff said about Simpson, such as the claim she learned exotic sexual techniques while living in China with her first husband and then used them to ensnare the king. Sebba also doesn't believe the Windsors were card-carrying Nazis, but they foolishly met with Hitler, socialized with prominent Nazis and British Fascists and were stoutly pro-German. Sebba also makes a case for the theory that Bessiewallis Warfield was born (in Baltimore in 1896) with a possible disorder of sexual development that gave her the appearance of a man and could explain her failure to have children with any of her husbands.

But despite being published on Valentine's Day, her book suggests this was no great romance — it was just a pathetic muddle.

"Few who knew them well described what they shared as love," Sebba writes near the end. Whatever it was, it left the couple in question adrift and unhappy for the rest of their lives, while placing a much more suitable couple on the British throne. The monarchy is better and stronger for it today.

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Review-a-Day for Tue, Sep 20: Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

by Faye E. Dudden A review by Nina Silber

For a moment amid the ferment after the Civil War, it seemed possible to at least some Americans that women would win the right to vote. The abolition of slavery put broad questions of voting rights and citizenship on the table, and legislators were eager to act. Women suffragists hoped their time had come. Instead, they saw their "fighting chance" evaporate with the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which outlawed disenfranchisement on the basis of race but not of sex. Women would have to wait half a century before they secured the vote in 1920.

Faye E. Dudden, a professor of history at Colgate College, attempts to shed new light on this episode in Fighting Chance. Hers is a tale of the ideological, political, and often intensely personal disputes that pitted former political allies in the abolitionist cause -- including Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony -- against one another. As they organized and campaigned for suffrage reforms around the country, these ardent activists eventually divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which Stanton and Anthony did not support because it failed to give women the vote.

Indeed, the two women ended up espousing a racist agenda that denigrated African-American and immigrant men in order to advance the cause of white womanhood. "Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung," Stanton wrote in her newspaper, The Revolution, as she editorialized in 1868 about the folly of allowing such ignorant men to make laws for educated women. Dudden seems interested in at least partly exonerating Stanton and Anthony, portraying their racist rhetoric as a response to those she believes were most to blame for upending the fighting chance for women's suffrage -- chief among them Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who in 1865 succeeded William Lloyd Garrison as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Money is a central thread in Dudden's story. In a legal and economic system that limited women's access to property and wage-earning opportunities, women reformers encountered onerous financial obstacles in funding their campaigns. Phillips was the trustee of an important bequest that both women's rights and antislavery activists could potentially draw upon. Believing that "antislavery" work would remain unfinished until blacks were accorded the ballot and full rights, he directed the money toward that goal and froze the women out.

Lack of funding was indeed an important factor in women's failure to secure the vote, but Dudden's focus on it constrains her analysis. Did Stanton really launch racist diatribes because Phillips deprived her cause of money? Surely the pervasive racism of 19th-century America had something to do with Stanton's attitude, as did her position of relative privilege and her distance -- she lived in New York City -- from the turmoil of the postwar South. Dudden insists that Phillips, in making the antislavery cause primary even after chattel slavery was declared dead, upheld a "pretense that 'slavery' was still at issue." But she acknowledges that immediately after the war President Andrew Johnson "warned that emancipation was only an experiment." Can Phillips honestly be accused of upholding a mere "pretense" in the face of what appeared a genuine threat to the cause he and others had worked so hard for?

In her eagerness to play down Stanton's racism, Dudden emphasizes Stanton's lawyerly tendency to argue "in the alternative" -- her penchant for trying out different arguments, even conflicting and racist ones, so long as she could gain some ground. And Dudden recounts other expressions of racial intolerance, including those of Lucy Stone, a supporter of black suffrage, perhaps in an effort to make Stanton and Anthony's bigotry appear less conspicuous.

All this gives readers a vivid sense of the intensely emotional and rancorous political landscape in which reformers worked immediately after the Civil War. Yet too much in this account hinges on highly personal developments that cannot be considered the most telling aspects of the story. Ultimately, the "fighting chance" for winning women's suffrage was lost not because of Wendell Phillips's arrogance or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lawyerly style of argumentation, but because Americans remained immersed in a climate of intense racial conflict. This volatile atmosphere convinced Phillips and other reformers that a campaign to advance voting rights for women was a liability in the critical work of securing, in the fullest sense, black emancipation.

Nina Silber, a professor of history at Boston University, has written extensively about gender relations in the Civil War era.

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Review-a-Day for Tue, Sep 20: Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

by Faye E. Dudden A review by Nina Silber

For a moment amid the ferment after the Civil War, it seemed possible to at least some Americans that women would win the right to vote. The abolition of slavery put broad questions of voting rights and citizenship on the table, and legislators were eager to act. Women suffragists hoped their time had come. Instead, they saw their "fighting chance" evaporate with the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which outlawed disenfranchisement on the basis of race but not of sex. Women would have to wait half a century before they secured the vote in 1920.

Faye E. Dudden, a professor of history at Colgate College, attempts to shed new light on this episode in Fighting Chance. Hers is a tale of the ideological, political, and often intensely personal disputes that pitted former political allies in the abolitionist cause -- including Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony -- against one another. As they organized and campaigned for suffrage reforms around the country, these ardent activists eventually divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which Stanton and Anthony did not support because it failed to give women the vote.

Indeed, the two women ended up espousing a racist agenda that denigrated African-American and immigrant men in order to advance the cause of white womanhood. "Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung," Stanton wrote in her newspaper, The Revolution, as she editorialized in 1868 about the folly of allowing such ignorant men to make laws for educated women. Dudden seems interested in at least partly exonerating Stanton and Anthony, portraying their racist rhetoric as a response to those she believes were most to blame for upending the fighting chance for women's suffrage -- chief among them Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who in 1865 succeeded William Lloyd Garrison as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Money is a central thread in Dudden's story. In a legal and economic system that limited women's access to property and wage-earning opportunities, women reformers encountered onerous financial obstacles in funding their campaigns. Phillips was the trustee of an important bequest that both women's rights and antislavery activists could potentially draw upon. Believing that "antislavery" work would remain unfinished until blacks were accorded the ballot and full rights, he directed the money toward that goal and froze the women out.

Lack of funding was indeed an important factor in women's failure to secure the vote, but Dudden's focus on it constrains her analysis. Did Stanton really launch racist diatribes because Phillips deprived her cause of money? Surely the pervasive racism of 19th-century America had something to do with Stanton's attitude, as did her position of relative privilege and her distance -- she lived in New York City -- from the turmoil of the postwar South. Dudden insists that Phillips, in making the antislavery cause primary even after chattel slavery was declared dead, upheld a "pretense that 'slavery' was still at issue." But she acknowledges that immediately after the war President Andrew Johnson "warned that emancipation was only an experiment." Can Phillips honestly be accused of upholding a mere "pretense" in the face of what appeared a genuine threat to the cause he and others had worked so hard for?

In her eagerness to play down Stanton's racism, Dudden emphasizes Stanton's lawyerly tendency to argue "in the alternative" -- her penchant for trying out different arguments, even conflicting and racist ones, so long as she could gain some ground. And Dudden recounts other expressions of racial intolerance, including those of Lucy Stone, a supporter of black suffrage, perhaps in an effort to make Stanton and Anthony's bigotry appear less conspicuous.

All this gives readers a vivid sense of the intensely emotional and rancorous political landscape in which reformers worked immediately after the Civil War. Yet too much in this account hinges on highly personal developments that cannot be considered the most telling aspects of the story. Ultimately, the "fighting chance" for winning women's suffrage was lost not because of Wendell Phillips's arrogance or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lawyerly style of argumentation, but because Americans remained immersed in a climate of intense racial conflict. This volatile atmosphere convinced Phillips and other reformers that a campaign to advance voting rights for women was a liability in the critical work of securing, in the fullest sense, black emancipation.

Nina Silber, a professor of history at Boston University, has written extensively about gender relations in the Civil War era.

Try the Award-winning WQ Risk-free!! Subscribe today...

The Wilson Quarterly is a window on the world of ideas for the curious reader. Historical perspective and a willingness to consider all sides are the hallmarks of its wide-ranging articles on politics, foreign affairs, culture, science, and the arts.

Subscribe now and sample the first issue risk-free. With payment of a year's subscription ($24), each reader receives free, unlimited access to the WQ archive -- a virtual cornucopia of great reading. If you enjoy the issue, join our cadre of loyal, intelligent readers. If not, mark "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing.

A great reading experience awaits you.

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HAVANA REAL: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Yoani Sanchez
Translated from the Spanish by M
ISBN 978-1935554257
240 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Mary Speck

No revolution has cultivated the image of manly, youthful rebellion longer and more successfully than Cuba's. The iconic image of Cuban communism remains the famous photo of a young Che Guevara, beret stuck atop a head of unruly hair, gaze fixed unflinchingly on the horizon. Even as Cuban leaders slip into senescence, they market their 50-year-old regime as a heroic David-vs.-Goliath story of resistance to U.S. power.

So it is fitting that the Cuban Revolution's best-known dissident is the anti-Che in almost every respect: a slender, bookish woman who writes "Generation Y," an intensely personal blog that eschews exhortations and absolute truths. Yoani Sanchez has gained an international following by chronicling the lives of those taught as school children to chant "we will be like Che" only to see their existence reduced to working at dead-end jobs, standing in line at half-empty state stores or hustling for enough cash to shop at convertible-currency-only supermarkets.

The contrast between the exalted rhetoric of Cuban communism and the realities of life in Havana has created "new men" (and women), but not in the way envisioned by the bearded guerrillas who came to power in 1959. "Our autocracy produced unexpected results, far from fanaticism or veneration," Sanchez writes in a new collection of her work, "Havana Real." "Instead of stern-faced soldiers, it bred apathy, indifference, people who concealed their true selves, rafters, infidels, and young people fascinated by material goods." The Cubans who populate these blog posts, written from 2007 to 2010, hold out little hope for top-down economic change, having learned the hard way that reform will be followed by the "dreaded rectification." Instead they plot escape plans, leaving those who stay behind, like Sanchez, in the "sad position of having to remake my group of friends."

Only when Sanchez writes of the blogosphere does her tone shift from melancholy to guarded optimism. "The Internet will not be a crumb that falls from above, a privilege earned by good conduct," she says. "It is slow but it will reach nearly all Cubans."

How many Cubans on the island are able to read Sanchez's blog? It is hard to say, though even those without access to the Web may receive this virtual samizdat in email messages, phone calls or surreptitiously distributed printed copies. What is read in Miami or Mexico City or Madrid eventually finds its way back to the island, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars sent there each month by relatives and friends abroad.

"I avoid using words such as 'eternal,' 'always' and 'never,'" Sanchez writes. "The definitive scares me and the everlasting stinks." Instead she celebrates the evanescent truths of daily existence. With her vivid portraits of family and friends, including Cuba's determined dissidents, Yoani Sanchez dissolves the abstractions used to fuse individuals into generic masses. Little wonder that state media have labeled her and her friends "cyber commandos."

Mary Speck is writing a book on pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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