Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk
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way”—to be “highly articulate, contentious, witty, and to hold all authority except theirs in a certain degree of contempt.”63 While introspection was discouraged, “[w]ithin the magical space they had created for us . . . we were given an enormous amount of physical freedom—to play, to roam, to have fights and adventures.”64 A large family in an ancestral home in Scotland is the setting of the novel Home Truths, but perhaps the most significant influence family life has had on Sara Maitland as a writer is the witty, bantering style of her authorial voice.
Maitland was “excessively well-educated at expensive girls’ schools in London and Wiltshire.”65 Her education would provide her with a love and sense of ownership of classical myth, so important in her short stories.66 Maitland describes boarding school as “a damaging, brutal experience, made worse by the fact that in my parents’ world not to enjoy your schooldays was proof that you were an inferior human being—you were supposed to be ‘a good mixer,’ to ‘take the rough with the smooth.’”67 The high expectations that Maitland grew up with, both at home and at school, perhaps feed into the explorations of religious guilt in her writing:
At home we were supposed to get into Cambridge, and wear long white gloves, a tartan silk sash and our deceased grandmother’s pearls, and dance at Highland Balls. I was expected to have my own political opinions, and have them turn out the same as my parents. We were expected to be sociable, active and witty, and hard-working, industrious and calm. We were meant to be sociable and popular and bizarrely chaste. At school we were meant to be educated, independent, self-assured and totally innocent.68
In a 1986 essay Maitland compares the demands her father made of his children—his “tribe”—to those of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible: “his devotion and loyalty in exchange for keeping their law.”69 As an adolescent she was “a father-identified daughter” who “wanted to be Pallas Athene to his Zeus.”70 The protagonists of Maitland’s novels Daughter of Jerusalem, Virgin Territory and Three Times Table are women who have adoring relationships with demanding fathers. In “Two for the Price of One,” Maitland conceptualizes the oppressive ideal ‘Father’ that she has internalized as a being separate from her real father, who died of cancer in 1982: “[i]n my late teens I fled away from my father’s house; it has taken me a long time to realise that I carried with me the Father from whom I could not escape by escaping childhood, from whom I have not yet escaped, and from whom I have had, and still have, to wrest my loves, my voice, my feminism and my freedom.”71
Maitland’s upbringing in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland lent her “a great love of the Bible and a generally warm feeling about Christianity,” but she had no “sense of ‘personal conversion,’ of passion or commitment”; thus “[a]s a teenager the mantle of Christianity simply slipped off.”72 The Christianity she encountered at Oxford in the 1970s was not to her at odds with her new-found socialism and feminism amidst those heady days: “[i]t was this conviction of enormous possibility that brought me back to thinking about God . . . made brave by hope and anger, I was tough enough for the enormous God whom I met.”73 In 1972, Maitland converted to Anglicanism; the same year she married an American training to be a vicar. They were Anglo-Catholic, a culture Maitland enjoyed as “colourful, gossipy, close-knit, extravagant and deeply-ironic,” while believing that “the strongly sacramental constructions of high-church liturgical practice balanced the rationalist and individualist tendencies of much feminist theory.”74
Maitland had her first child, a daughter, in 1973, and living in London as a mother and vicar’s wife she became more involved with the feminist movement, and started to refer to herself as a writer. She wrote and published with the Women Writers Collective of Michelene Wandor, Zoe Fairbairns, Valerie Miner and Michèle Roberts; her 1978 novel Daughter of Jerusalem—a contemporary feminist’s ambivalent struggle with infertility, interspersed with the stories of biblical women—won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1982 her son Adam was born; 1983 saw the publication of a non-fiction book about Christian feminism, A Map of the New Country, and a collection of short stories, Telling Tales. At this time she also wrote a third-person narrative of her experience as a feminist writer, “A Feminist Writer’s Progress,” with a fairy-tale structure, explaining her move from social realism to revisioning of myth.75 Her second novel, Virgin Territory, was published in 1984; a further book of short stories, A Book of Spells, and an epistolary novel, Arky Types, written with Michelene Wandor, would appear in 1987. As a feminist writer, mother and vicar’s wife, she would both play up to and feel awkward about her “eccentric” image.76 In an autobiographical essay at the end of A Book of Spells, she describes being a writer and a mother:
This morning I was meant to be upstairs, drafting a short story. It is not their demandingness that keeps me from this sterner pleasure, but their loveliness. I have written before about how their dailiness and iron will for my attention balance and protect me against the dangerous voyages of the imagination—they ballast me safely with normality and connectedness, and ensure my return to sanity and to home. I have not written about the reverse: how the rigour and excitement and challenge of writing fiction weights me against their enchantment, against maternal romanticism and the isolated womb life in the garden.77
Maitland describes her life in the 1970s and 80s as an immensely happy time, “a marvelous life.”78 But at the end of the 1980s, this disintegrated: her marriage was ending, amidst the depressing contexts of Thatcherism and the increasing right-wing misogyny of Anglo-Catholicism. Thus in the early 1990s she underwent a period of profound life changes. Her theological interests, enriched by her interest in science, focused on “a huge, wild, dangerous God . . . a God of almost manic creativity, ingenuity and enthusiasm; a Big-Enough God”;79 a theme of her novels Three Times Table and Home Truths, and some of the short stories of Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching. In 1993 she converted to Roman Catholicism: “there has been no doctrinal or liturgical change for me, merely a repositioning of my relationship to authority; a reaffirmation, despite its many sillinesses (and I must say wrongnesses) that a church can, and must, be universal, can be large scale through time and space—can indeed be big enough.”80
Maitland moved to a house in a small Northamptonshire village, in which she was “suddenly, and without exactly planning it, living on my own for the first time in my life.”81 Maitland found that she loved the solitude and silence, and wanted more of it. She associates the experience of change and a renewed sense of self with her age—not only the changing circumstances of a marriage ending and children leaving home—but also by the physiological “change” of the menopause. This is something that is little discussed in western culture, “terrified of the process of ageing, and in which women are encouraged to take artificial hormones so that they do not enter this magical condition.”82 Maitland’s collection of short stories written during