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24 September, 2023

Rufus Sewell and Juliet Aubrey in Middlemarch (1994)

The rise of “sad girl lit”

When George Eliot wrote her merciless takedown of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in 1856, says Charlotte Stroud in The New Statesman, “she did not intend the genre to survive her attack”. How vexed the Middlemarch author would be to learn that this literary monster has recently grown a new head. The 21st-century versions – Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, Ottessa Moshfegh and the like – bear the unmistakable marks of the original “silly breed” diagnosed by Eliot: they mistake “vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality”; they treat the less enlightened with a “patronising air of charity”, and despite their mediocrity, are unfailingly hailed by critics in the “choicest phraseology of puffery”.

While the silly novels of Eliot’s day were romances, the modern breed offers a new genre dubbed “sad girl lit” – the “lady author” has been replaced by the “cool girl novelist”. It seems to be a “prerequisite for publication” that young woman writers are “incurably downcast”. The anti-heroine of these novels is invariably a PhD student (“or at least an MA”), whose knowledge of intersectional theory has left her “crippled by a near-constant anxiety about power imbalances”. She is worried to the point of exhaustion “about the plight of the individual under capitalism”. And these books are forever trying to improve our morals, for Eliot the “most pitiable” crime of all. If only one of these clearly talented novelists would try injecting a little humour. After all, the novel is not meant to be a vehicle for moral lessons, or for the display of intelligence, but a “place where human beings can go to laugh at – which is to try to make sense of – the human condition”.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy: not a scratch on today’s postgrads

Far-left dogma is alive and well on college campuses

There’s a “symbolic weight”, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times, to news that Ibram X Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research is “laying off 15 or 20 staff members”. It seems to confirm the growing sense that “peak woke” is behind us, and, after all the hoo-ha since 2020, the “revolution has run its course”. And it’s true that the wave of cancellations and “public-monument removals” has receded. But it may be a false dawn. Progressive orthodoxies are growing stronger in academia, for example, where professors applying for jobs are increasingly required to submit “diversity statements” detailing their commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusion”. One psychology professor lost a potential role at the University of California in Los Angeles for saying on a podcast years ago that he thought diversity statements were a bad idea, even though he had dutifully filled one out himself.

From the perspective of the graduate students who protested his appointment, “mere compliance was insufficient”. Even during McCarthyism, the “loyalty oaths” only entailed a “generic affirmation” of loyalty to the US constitution, not a “statement of positive ideological belief”. What’s alarming is that the real height of woke came during the “atmosphere of political emergency” of the Donald Trump years, when fear of populism or authoritarianism meant mainstream liberals struggled to resist the “demands of ideological fealty” made by movements on the far left. Now the emergency mentality has retreated, and resistance and scepticism are easier. In a Trump restoration, the next “peak of wokeness” may be higher.

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Stewart arriving at a cabinet meeting in 2019. Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty

“We will definitely think about that, Minister, and come back to you”

When I was first made a government minister, says Rory Stewart in his new book Politics on the Edge, I couldn’t have been more excited. Driven straight from No 10 to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I was greeted at the front door by five civil servants. “Welcome, Minister,” they said, before ushering me to the lift marked “Ministers Only”. On the big table in my luxurious office was my “red box” – the cherry-coloured, lead-lined briefcase stuffed with briefing notes. Eager to get started, I asked the civil servants what the priorities should be. “You are the experts,” I said. “What would you like to change?” In a tone that “oozed restrained competence”, the most senior member of the group replied: “We will definitely think about that, Minister, and come back to you.”

Even more disappointing was my first meeting with my new boss, Liz Truss. She began by asking for a 10-point plan for the national parks, which I told her I’d have ready in four weeks. “You have three days, Rory,” she replied, with “such exaggerated firmness” I wondered if she was joking. “We need to get it into the Telegraph on Friday.” It would be easy, she said. “Make it eight points, if you can’t find 10. But 10 is better.” Next, she told me to cut my part of the department by 25%. I stared at her. “Don’t worry, Rory,” she said. “I have a mentor who is a very successful businessman who says all businesses can always be cut by 20%. I want 20% staff cuts too.” It began to dawn on me why David Cameron was so “mesmerised” by Truss. “Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity.” Governing, for her, was not about critical thinking, or “truth and reason”. It was just “partisanship and slogans”. And if she worried about the consequences of that simple-minded approach, “she didn’t reveal it”.

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Members of Alpha Phi sorority at George Washington University. Al Drago/CQ Roll Call/Getty

How to get into the right sisterhood

Getting into a sorority at an American university is a competitive business, says Charlie McCann in 1843 magazine. Membership to the single-sex clubs lasts a lifetime; their secrets – and privilege – are “keenly guarded”. Every year, about a fifth of applicants either drop out or don’t get accepted. That’s where “sorority consultants” come in: a growing cadre of women hired by parents to coach their daughters on getting into the right sisterhood. Kristin Wallach, who co-founded Sorority 101, charges between $500 and $1,800 per client, “depending on how much shepherding girls require”. This year, she coached over 120 women.

Her job is to “teach applicants what to wear and what to say”. She helps them pull together their “social resumés”, produce short video introductions, and secure letters of recommendation from sorority alumni. “This is truly just like looking for a job or applying for college,” she says. When it comes to “rush” – the week-long process where sororities decide whom to accept – she reminds clients never to respond to questions monosyllabically and to ask lots of questions of their own. “You gotta remember these girls text a lot,” she explains. “They don’t talk face to face as much as we did.” Her other key job is making sure the applicant’s social media is sorority-friendly: that means no photos of drunken nights out, and not too much cleavage. “We want the girls to be super-genuine,” says Wallach, “but want them to do it tastefully.”

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Boticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman

Europe’s Renaissance brought innovations not just in science and learning, but beauty too, says Anna Parker in the Times Literary Supplement. Some of them don’t sound too tempting. Giovanni Marinello’s The Ornaments of Ladies (1562) recommends achieving sleek eyebrows by mixing soot from burnt hazelnuts with goat or bear fat, “and to apply the resulting paste with a fine brush”. Body hair was removed with “rhusma paste”, a noxious blend of arsenic sulphide and quicklime which could burn the skin – Italian noblewoman Caterina Sforza recommended leaving it on no longer than “the time it took to say the Lord’s Prayer twice”. But like many today, contemporary moralists were firm on the idea that less is more. In On the Beauty of Women (1548), Agnolo Firenzuola warned against make-up applied “not unlike plaster or gypsum on the surface of walls”.

Baden-Powell surround by his “crusaders for national regeneration”. Getty

The hundred-year myth of British decline

If you’ve been following the school concrete furore, or have “found yourself stuck for hours on a rail replacement bus”, you know the idea, says Dominic Sandbrook in The Times. “Britain is in deep decline.” Our infrastructure is “dirty, scruffy, antiquated, broken”. Our politicians are useless and our policemen are powerless. But this narrative could equally apply to Britain in the early 1900s, or the 1960s, or the mid 1990s. People have always written off the country as “condemned to shabbiness and failure”. In 1982, the American writer Paul Theroux travelled around the British coastline and was shocked that people were such “wet blankets” about the UK. During the 1950s and 60s, wages “grew at an unprecedented rate” – but the economist Michael Shanks spoke of a nation of “genteel poverty”.

This narrative of decline applied even in the “heyday of empire”. Rudyard Kipling’s poem Recessional, which marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, predicted that Britain’s imperial power would melt away. Sir Robert Baden-Powell was so disturbed about Britain’s patchy performance in the Boer War that he set up the scouts to turn youngsters into “crusaders for national regeneration”. In general, “declinism has been most pronounced at the end of long periods of Tory rule” – which has an “obvious and depressing implication” for Rishi Sunak’s election prospects. For the rest of us, it’s heartening. An “allegedly decadent, degenerate Britain” still managed to win two world wars. For a country that’s been “doomed” for more than a century, “we haven’t done too badly”.

“It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.”

Frank Kermode

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