• 1  No satire! No parody or pastiche! No rhetorical turns at all for historians, said the eighteenth-c (...)
• 2  Peter Thonemann, ‘Not Quite Cambridge. Academia today would frown on the Father of History’, Times (...)

2The best thing, of course, would be to make you laugh. I long to provoke laughter. The best thing ever said about my writing, in a review of an article about the serious topic of eighteenth-century domestic servants’ and slave-servants’ encounters with the law, was that ‘she is often very funny’. Your laughter would be the obverse of ‘so what?’. Laughter would show that we had both got it–had really got the point–that writer and reader were on the same page. It would spell communication; we would be at one, ‘So what?’ gone, banished. Wanting to be funny is a heterodox impulse for a historian. Historians have been warned since the mid-eighteenth century against using comedy.1 ‘You could write an interesting book on why humour is allowed in some literary genres and not others: academic philosophy makes liberal use of jokes, parody and satire; history writing, not so much’, said a recent reviewer of two new books on Herodotus (a historian of the ancient world who told some good jokes).2 Next thing, after this, I am going to write that book.

• 3  C. Steedman, Landscape for Good Woman, Londres, Virago, 1986; Landscape for a Good Woman. A Story (...)
• 4  For a brief account of the RAE and the REF and its effects on historical writing, C. Steedman, ‘Th (...)

3There is absolutely nothing to laugh about in the case of Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). The US edition has a sub-title: A Story of Two Lives. I resisted that at the time, but now am grateful for the contents summary it provides: it explains, so I don’t have to.3 The book relates two childhoods, that of my mother (1913-1983) in the cotton manufacturing region of the northwest (Burnley, Lancashire); and mine (1947-) in first West, then South London. It is my best-known book; it has thousands of citations in Google Scholar; I have received many emails over the years from readers telling me it has changed their life. The mixture of diffidence, shame and embarrassment at my own silent response to all of this, is debilitating. I am ashamed that my first, irritated (silent! I have never said any of this) reaction is always: I’ve written other books! Why don’t you read one of those, and see if it changes your life? Why don’t any of you, ever, read the historical chapters in about the way in which the cotton towns of the northwest shaped psychic structure from about 1860-1930? Why don’t you take any notice of the history of childhood that it relates? Why are you so interested in me? I am really not a nice person in relation to Landscape for a Good Woman. I even have a joke about being not very nice: I parody the title as My Mother, My Albatross, but only with those who know exactly how exclusionary would be the demand that the whole world be conversant with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798). Then: there’ll be a panto of it any day now; how about ‘Landscape for a Good Woman on Ice’? I experience a pathetic pleasure in telling people that I doubt that any of my colleagues–any historian–has ever heard of it, let alone read it. ‘It’s not history!’ I declaim. ‘Why should they read it?’. When the Research Assessment Exercise (now the Research Excellence Framework) was first inaugurated in the UK there were serious discussions about whether such a book could be returned as one of Warwick History’s ‘outputs’.4 (It wasn’t returned.) A lot of my relationship with the book is bound up with the idea of me as a historian… Or not a historian. If I wrote this not-a-history can I call myself one?

• 5  Eva Wiseman, ‘What happens after you tell your story? That’s a story in itself’, Observer Magazine(...)
• 6  Blake Morrison, ‘My sister’s death left me feeling neglectful’, Guardian, 28 January 2023; Two Sis (...)

6There is something of a furore at the moment in the UK, about the kind of support that should be offered to those writing memoirs (what would just a few years ago have been called ‘autobiography’ is now unambiguously ‘memoir’, and those who write ‘memoirs’ are ‘memoirists’). Is there a case for therapeutic support to be offered to those who have not only retrieved and committed to paper the most traumatic of experiences, but who also face the judgement and pity of ‘their family, strangers, lawyers and the internet itself… across 24 time zones’?5 Blake Morrison the novelist has written about the reaction to his recent Two Sisters: virulent accusations that to ‘publicise difficult family stuff is mercenary, opportunistic and, worst of all, unliterary’. Referencing his earlier books about his father and his mother, he adds that ‘I am a serial offender’.6

• 7  The Tidy House. Little Girls Writing, Londres, Virago, 1982. It appears that I wrote two articles (...)

7I am trying to work out where I was coming from, in the 1980s, with Landscape for a Good Woman. I believe that the story of my story begins with my first book, The Tidy House (1982). This was the analysis and contextualisation of another story, written by three working-class eight-year-old girls in a primary school classroom, in the summer of 1976. I was the children’s class teacher. They had produced an extraordinary piece of writing, about the council house they will inhabit one day, on the decaying housing estate where they live and will always live; about love and motherhood and the life they expect to inherent. The children they invented for their story are themselves, as they believe their mothers see them: longed for, but also sources of irritation and resentment.7 I saw my own mother plain, in their writing. The book was published by Virago Press, the feminist publishing house established in 1973. This is an equally important part of the story of my story: readers’ understanding of what a book from a feminist publisher means; what it must mean.

• 8  Kathleen Woodward, Jipping Street, Londres, Virago, 1983 [1928].
• 9  ‘The idea to create the feminist publishing house Virago came to Carmen Callil, who died at the ag (...)

8You’re a historian, so your first duty is contextualisation. One of the contexts to the children’s story, ‘Tidy House’ was the history of children’s self-writing. I also considered self-narration: I included the testimony of nineteenth-century little girls telling their life’s story, to some social investigator, or to a lawyer working for a government commission of inquiry into child labour. Women’s and girls’ account of the relationship between mothers and daughters was profoundly different from the picture painted by male working-class writers of the long nineteenth-century, of ‘our mam’, of ‘the best woman who ever lived’, loving and enduring in the memories of men gown old. I read Kathleen Woodward’s Jipping Street, out of print, forgotten after its publication in 1928. Here, in her daughter’s words, was another mother I recognised, who told her child how long she was in labour with her, what agonies she endured to give her life, who instructed her daughter that she was an impossible burden, and not to complain.8 Virago had launched its Modern Classics reprint series in 1978; I wrote to Carmen Callil its founder to propose a reprint for Jipping Street.9 In the new introduction I was asked to write, I laid out what would be the foundations of Landscape for a Good Woman: I claimed that Jipping Street is

• 11  Judith Arcana, Our Mother’s Daughters, Berkeley CA, Shameless Hussy Press, 1979.
• 12  Jean McCrindle et Sheila Rowbotham, Dutiful Daughters, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979, p. 116.
• 13  C. Steedman, ‘Landscape for a Good Woman´, dans Liz Heron (dir.), Truth, Dare or Promise. Girls Gr (...)

9You can tell what I had in my sights: not only conventional working-class autobiography, but also the new-ish genre of mother-daughter romance, which exercised me quite a lot. Judith Arcana’s Our Mother’s Daughters (1979) exercised me a very great deal, another moment of creeping shame for my past behaviour; but still: the mothers here are not my mother! Not Kathleen Woodward’s mother.11 And not Maggie Fuller’s, who when interviewed for a collection of women’s oral histories published in 1979, remembered back fifty years and said simply, ‘I hate my mother’.12 After the Virago reprint of Jipping Street was out, Carmen Callil wrote to propose a whole book along the lines of these observations. What happened next? Did I just sit down and write the whole damn thing? That can’t be the case, for there was Liz Heron’s edited ‘girlhoods’, Truth, Dare or Promise (1985), which included ‘Landscape for a Good Woman’. Not very long afterwards, I rewrote my contribution to Heron’s collection as the beginning of the book.13

• 14  C. Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community. The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, (...)

10Contributors to Truth, Dare… were asked for an autobiographical postscript to their piece. In mine, I explained the personal disasters of the 1970s, the trouble with my PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge, teaching in a primary school–’easier for others to accept as a valid past if I had filled shelves in a supermarket all those years instead of working at the nether end of the intellectual world’, I wrote. I hadn’t seen my mother during those years because I knew what she thought: ‘was it all for this? A teacher–like being a nurse or a policeman; something I could have done anyway, without her sacrifice’. (My PhD thesis was on the policing of mid-Victorian English communities by working-class men who made the journey out of theirs by joining a county force. I thought a lot about policemen in the 1970s.14) I recounted with seeming glee a Special Subject seminar (‘Poverty as a Problem of Social Policy, 1880-1914’; this was at the University of Sussex, 1967), my telling another student in IMG (the International Marxist Group), that my mother, out of her own experience always voted Conservative, thereby directing my fire at E. P. Thompson’s theory of ‘experience’ in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) as well as the Boy Marxist who later, in the snack bar, wondered if I couldn’t have a word with her, and get her to vote with her class. There is such fierce joy in being nonconformist. ‘Now there are feminisms, soft and sentimental, that would have my mother return to me, and make us sisters in adversity’, I concluded. (I must already have read Judith Arcana by the time I wrote this, in 1984).

• 15  Simone Murray, ‘The Cuala Press. Women, Publishing, and the Conflicted Genealogies of ‘Feminist Pu (...)
• 16  Elizabeth Bird, ‘Women’s Studies and the Women’s Movement in Britain. Origins and Evolution, 1970- (...)
• 17  Alison S. Fell, ‘French Feminist Theory. An Introductio´, French Studies, 59 (3), 2005, p. 436-437 (...)

11Feminism (then still just-about, called Women’s Liberation) and its institutions were important to these publications: only because of the rapid development of feminist publishing in the 1970s did any of this writing see the light of day; it is unlikely that most of it would have got written in the first place without it.15 Academic feminism was also a conduit for what was known as ‘Continental Theory’ for those who taught on emerging Women’s Studies courses in UK universities. When I joined the University of Warwick in 1984 I was almost immediately recruited to help design and later teach on an interdisciplinary Master’s degree in Women’s Studies.16 ‘Theory’ was our bread and butter: psycho-analysis, marxist-feminism, semiotics, semiology, narratology, post-structuralism, theories of patriarchy, feminism’s Foucault, Bourdieu’s class and gender… as they enabled thinking about women and gender. ‘Theory’ informed our teaching; it was hard work, translating the latest word from France for the seminar room.17

• 18  C. Steedman, ‘History and Autobiography. Different Pasts´, Past Tenses. Essays on Writing, Autobio (...)

13I knew this history long ago, but I had forgotten it, until just now. And I have had to explain these things before. In the essay collection Past Tenses (1992) there is an endnote telling me that one of the essays was originally a seminar paper, delivered at the Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in March 1986.18 (No memory, at all. Did this really ever happen? The archivist at the Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham University, has searched the CCCS records, the University Bulletin… the lot, and tells me that I am not listed as a seminar speaker.) What I said (or maybe, never said, but certainly did publish in 1992) was that I had been asked to talk about That Book and the question of autobiography. I said that before I began to write the book, I had to find a history (history was my problem–why did I want it and so few of my audience not want history? – why did I insist on their having it?). I meant that I had to find something: a document, a text–some trace of the past to work on. In the case of Landscape for Good Woman, Kathleen Woodward’s Jipping Street had been the trace, the document. Then I said pretty much what I have said above. I’m still telling the same old story.

• 19  C. Steedman, ’About Ends. On How the End is Different from an Ending´, History of the Human Scienc (...)

15‘History and Autobiography’ dwells on the end–the sense of an ending –, an idea I was to explore in much greater detail in the 1990s.19 Autobiography allows an ending, a completeness for the self telling the story, whose narrative you have now, a finished thing, in your hands. But history–writing history, reading it–does not allow this. ‘History’ is constructed around the understanding that things are not over, that the story isn’t finished: that there is no End. Closures have to be made of course, to finish arguments and to get books to publishers. But the story can’t be finished because there is always the possibility that some new evidence will alter the argument and account. A historical narrative is always temporary and impermanent. A life story, on the other hand, is a confirmation of the self that stands there telling, sits there writing, the story. History might offer the chance of denying it: that it was like that; that things have been and are like this. For all my denial that what I wrote in Landscape for Good Woman was history, I think I hoped that history might rescue me from the bleak knowledge that it would have been better if it hadn’t happened that way; if it hadn’t happened at all. By saying ‘it’s not history’ I was refusing to be rescued–but only in the superstitious way of a child, who hopes that thinking hard enough about the bad thing will prevent it from happening. But it did happen. It has happened. Or that’s the story. You are free to say so what?, but it is written down, so you cannot wither it. And neither can I.

• 20  Angela Rodaway, A London Childhood, Londres, Batsford, 1960 ; Londres, Virago Press, 1985 ; C. Ste (...)
• 21  C. Steedman, ‘Angela Rodaway´, p. 195.
• 22  Clifford Yorke, ‘Winnicott, Donald Woods (1896-1971), paediatrician and psychoanalyst´, Oxford Dic (...)

16In 1988, Virago Press set its authors a task: newer writers were to have a conversation with older ones whose work had been republished in the Virago Classics series. I was matched with Angela Rodaway (1918-2012) whose A London Childhood (1960) had recently been reissued.20 I drove to Bristol where she lived and talked to her over two days. The interview that appears in Writing Lives is from the second, and I believe that I transcribed it myself from a tape recording, but can’t be sure. ‘I started by asking Angela if she had been conscious of writing with a tradition, and if she had read autobiographies of working-class childhood in the Fifties’.21 She replied No: ‘I purposely would not have read them. Because I like to do what I feel is best’. She had not read Landscape for a Good Woman! This was wonderful and liberating! Reading my questions now, at a distance of thirty-odd years, I see that I followed her lead (I am pleased about that) in order to turn many of my questions to the topic of writing–its practicalities, its procedures, the kind of thing writing is. In my Introduction to the interview I recounted the surprises of A London Childhood in its delineation of a complex psychology and sexual development–’usually denied to the children who are the subjects of working-class autobiography’, I wrote. I recount with deep satisfaction the passages in London Childhood where Rodaway described roaming around London with her best friend from school, Sonia. On one of their perambulations they get as far as Surbiton (14 miles from North London to deepest Surrey) where they encountered at another friend’s house the psycho-analyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), disguised in London Childhood as ‘Donald Waterton/’Uncle Donald’).22 ‘It is the early 1930s, Sonia and Angela are about thirteen, and they have both read Winnicott’s Clinical Notes on the Disorders of Childhood. In the poor streets of Islington, things are not what they seem…’.