As regular visitors to this blog will know, my favourite regular reading is the London Review of Books. My attention was held in the latest edition by an article about the American writer Linda Nochlin. I had never heard of her before …. which is poetically significant at least because, as I discovered, one of her most important contributions as a writer was her 1971 essay “Why have there been no great women artists?”* The essay had a great impact, and has been followed by the restoration to fame of the contribution of several women artists such as Artemesia Genitleschi.**
This set me thinking about the question of women in the arts, and by coincidence I am currently reading a novel by Patti Callahan. Becoming Mrs. Lewis is a fictional account of the relationship between the writer and theologian C.S. Lewis, and the American poet Joy Davidman. I have been interested to discover, in particular, that she was a poet of some standing. Previously my only knowledge of her was based on the stage play (and later the film) Shadowlands, and in that context she appears as significant primarily because of the part she played in the life of Lewis. I have only recently begun to read Callahan’s novel, but already I have formed the impression that this might turn out to be a rather selective account of that relationship.
*This is due to be re-publiished, I gather, in the New Year.
**I notice with some interest that mention of her work in the 1997 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Art consists of a footnote to the entry devoted to her father.