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The pursuit of life: is it possible to be a mum and write a masterpiece?

Nancy Mitford became a better writer following a hysterectomy. So what effect, wonders Laura Thompson, does the prospect of motherhood have on creativity? And what happens if you do give birth?

Sunday 02 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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In 1941 Nancy Mitford wrote a letter to her sister Diana Mosley, in which she responded to the news that their younger sister Deborah (now the Duchess of Devonshire) had given birth to a stillborn baby. "Poor Debo it must be wretched the worst thing in the world I should think – except losing a manuscript which I always think must be the worst."

This remark echoes Jane Austen's famous reference to her books as "her children". It's also cruelly appropriate, since Nancy's letter was written from a hospital bed, where she was recovering from a hysterectomy. Deborah, 21 at the time, would go on to have three children. Nancy, on the other hand, would go on to produce eight books. From this point onwards, losing a manuscript would indeed be "the worst thing in the world": from the age of 37 when she had her hysterectomy her life was definitively set on a certain path: that of the professional writer.

The next book Nancy wrote, The Pursuit of Love, brought her fame and fortune and the means to acquire an independent new life in Paris. Before this, when she was married and suffered repeated miscarriages, she had published four novels, which earned her about £100 apiece. Enchanting though they are, they have what one can only call an amateurish quality. They feel as if a part of Nancy's head had been elsewhere: fixed upon an image of the life of wife and mother that she had been brought up to view as her destiny.

Yet once she knew that this was not her destiny, and that a child would not come along to save her marriage to a glamorous, adulterous wastrel named Peter Rodd, something in Nancy seemed to shift focus, and she produced a succession of masterpieces: The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), two more novels and four historical biographies. Her life had become her own, whether she had wanted it to or not. And she made the most of this gift by becoming an artist.

The brutal removal of her ability to have children liberated her into creativity. "Faute de mieux," the Duchess of Devonshire said to me, believing as she does that Nancy longed to have a family, and of course this may be right. And it led me to ask the fundamental question: would Nancy ever have written the books that she did had a baby come into her life?

Just what is the relationship between these two lives, that of the mother and that of the writer? Can the two be reconciled, or are they always at war? I was fairly sure that Nancy would not have written the books that she did had she, as she once put it, been obliged to live "with 2 Peter Rodds in the house". But then Nancy was a product of a particular marriage and a particular time; need it be that way?

Oddly enough I myself became pregnant the week after finishing my book. I lost the baby, but, in the brief period of its life inside me, I found myself thinking a great deal about all of this. In so far as I came to any conclusions I was optimistic that it was, yes, possible to sustain these two fundamental types of creativity. Nevertheless there were the simple logistics: how on earth do women find the space, the concentration, the time to perform their act of double creation?

"Well, there is a conflict, yes," says Claire Tomalin, recent winner of the Whitbread Prize for her biography of Samuel Pepys. "I mean, I got married and had a lot of children, and I didn't start writing seriously until I had my last child. But certainly with grandchildren, although I love my own, I slightly check myself against being the perfect granny because I think I've only got a certain amount of time left to work in."

Tomalin wrote her first book – a biography of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to Mary Shelley – while breastfeeding her son. Louisa Young, author of The Book of the Heart and recent recipient of a handsome deal to write a trilogy of children's books, also began writing after giving birth to her daughter. "Before I had her I was out all the time having adventures and wasting time. Having to stay put makes you find other ways to amuse yourself – such as writing. And having limited time makes you refine your repertoire no end."

Young, 43, belongs to a later generation than Claire Tomalin, 69, yet her description of writing at home with a baby is similar: both women simply got on and did it. Nor does Tomalin think that things have changed so very much. "I don't think it's any easier at all. I don't read as much modern fiction as I should, but I did see one of these books about combining motherhood and work, and I just felt an immense sympathy."

Perhaps it was simpler in Jane Austen's day when convention required that a choice be made. Austen did not fulfil her own expectation that she would become a wife and mother. Yet according to Tomalin, who wrote a biography of Austen: "Her sister Cassandra said that, by the end of her life, Jane triumphed over those women whose lives had been given over to childbirth."

"Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty," Austen wrote of her pregnant niece, giving the lie to the idea that the childless female author is to be pitied for her inability to live two simultaneous lives. Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës – nowadays, according to our orthodoxies, these women would all be writing their masterpieces while exercising their "right" to have a baby.

But would they have exercised this right? Is it not possible that George Eliot, for example – "the female Tolstoy", as Claire Tomalin says – would have had the honesty to admit that a book like Middlemarch is unlikely to get written between bottlefeeds and bedtime stories? Might she not have accepted the hard necessity of choice? As Bonnie Greer said recently on BBC2's Newsnight Review: "Art isn't what you do while you're waiting to pick the kids up from school."

Earlier writers, such as Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, would testify to this. Spark married young and had a son, but when she was establishing her career in London the child lived with her parents in Edinburgh. Lessing also had an early marriage which produced two children; after a few years she left this family (although she later had another son) to pursue life as a writer.

The struggle within these mother-writers is shown never more plainly than in the life of Jean Rhys, whose five novels were produced with a wrenching effort not unlike that of childbirth. Carole Angier's biography of Rhys describes a violently vivid scene in which her daughter, Maryvonne, was sent out for the day with a neighbour while Jean worked at her novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. By 4pm the child was back at home. "You are much too early!" her mother shouted. Yet after Maryvonne had gone back to live with her father, Jean Rhys begged her ex-husband for reassurance that their daughter had not forgotten her.

But these, again, were very particular circumstances; and, as Claire Tomalin says, "One can't generalise. I mean, Fanny Burney wrote having had a child. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after having a baby. And then, more recently, Margaret Drabble wrote her novels with small children knocking around."

These women are not female Tolstoys, but clearly it is possible to write and have children. The real issue, it seems, is the emotional attitude of the woman; and this is only partly a product of her times, her circumstances, her man or lack of one.

When I was pregnant, I thought a great deal about the fact that creating children was selfless, while creating art was selfish; yet did this make them irreducibly opposed or, perhaps, mysteriously similar? This question seems to me to sit at the heart of Rachel Cusk's meditation on motherhood, A Life's Work, which is infused with Cusk's fear of losing the essential self that makes her a writer. Yet with magical irony that very fear produced a book. And this, like the image of Claire Tomalin breastfeeding her baby while writing about Mary Wollstonecraft – who, poor woman, was planning her next book throughout the pregnancy which killed her – led me to feel that the two types of creativity might be able to feed off each other: that they might even, sometimes, be twin.

'Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford – A Portrait of a Contradictory Woman' by Laura Thompson, Review, £20

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