It’s easy to understand how Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women had such a powerful impact when it was first published in 1964. In the foreword for the new edition, author Ali Smith describes it as “one of the first books to address the complications of the female self”. Smith views its common theme as: “The radical necessity of giving and having voice. Its interviewees admit and repeat both desire and difficulty in just, well, talking.”
And talking is exactly what happens, in a series of in-depth, far-ranging interviews with women, aged from their early 20s to early 30s. Authors, including Edna O’Brien and Ann Quin, artist Pauline Boty and six more women with voices just as vibrant and valid, occasionally sad and haunting, sometimes even anachronistic and grating, cover an array of subjects from men, marriage, sexuality, children, work and emancipation to death, suicide, abortion and everything in between.
Dunn (Up the Junction, Poor Cow) was already a rebel against convention, a class refugee from a moneyed background who went to work in a factory in Battersea, south London. (Dunn’s fond, sparky conversation with factory friend Kathy Collier negates suspicions that she was “slumming it”.) Dunn’s individualism seems to further embolden her interviewees to speak freely. Antonia Simon, a photographer and mother of one boy, feels that sex is “only another language”. Boty says she married after only 10 days, because he was “the first man I met who really liked women… a terribly rare thing in a man”. Frances Chadwick, a furniture maker and mother of two daughters girls, feels that “scrubbing a floor isn’t so different from writing a poem”; Quin thinks that she needs a wife. O’Brien says of parenthood and creativity that, half the time, she’s about being a mother: “The other half, I want not to know that they’re alive.”
Collier sometimes thinks of gassing herself. “It’d cost you two or three bob in the meter,” quips Dunn; a moment brimming with gallows humour, in a book touched by darkness. Both Chadwick and Quin took their own lives; Boty died young of cancer (refusing treatment, while pregnant). During the interviews, some of the interviewees are clearly combating their conditioning (“I feel guilty about having an ugly cunt”). Indeed, there’s an encompassing theme of women struggling, albeit hopefully.
In the new preface, Dunn (who could be viewed as an effusive, immersive 10th interviewee, in her way) recalls conducting the interviews in a haze of camaraderie and wine, observing sagely: “Off we’d go to pin down what we wanted out of our lives, never dreaming for a moment that we may not get it.”
You do end up wishing that Dunn had drawn from a much larger, broader pool of women of different races, professions and ages (for a later book, she spoke to grandmothers). And there’s rather a lot of unintentionally hilarious angst about navigating the newly fashionable “open relationships” (you end up thinking, gawd, some of those early male hippies really pulled a number on women). There’s also a jarring propensity for the women, including Dunn, to fret about imminently losing their looks and not being desired any more. I’d read this, thinking: why are you worrying about that at all – you’re not even out of your 20s!? Then I’d remember with a jolt that the book was published before I was born, in a different time, with very different values.
This is one of the major strengths of Talking to Women – at times, one forgets that that these are women from the past. Yes, there’s the sense of a literary feminist time-capsule, capturing a key moment of generational societal shift. What’s less expected, and a bonus, is that the women (questioning, raging, joking, contemplating) often sound so current. Granted, it’s a selective, largely bohemian group. But you’re still left with the feeling, not only of how women were then, but also how modern women still are – as Smith says, just, well, talking.
• Talking to Women by Nell Dunn is published by Silver Press (£10.99). To order a copy for £9.34 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
