Personally, I think that the biggest barrier is myself. And I think this is really important for girls to hear actually. In my generation, there was a cultural assumption about what women could and could not do. And, you know, I look back now, and I suspect I have consistently underrated my ability to do things.
Jane Henshaw
Head of English at Sevenoaks School.
Q & A
Basic Questions:
1. What’s your name?
My name is Jane Henshaw.
2. Where are you from and where are you currently?
I'm from the UK and I'm still in the UK. I was born in Bristol but when I was a teenager, my family moved to Kent. I'm still in Kent today.
3. What do you do?
I'm the Head of English at Sevenoaks School.
Specific Questions:
1. What drives you to do what you do?
Pleasure! I love it. When I first started teaching, I did it because I love my subject. And I still do. But I find the company of young people so energising. It is a marvellous thing. I also think teaching is endlessly creative. You can't take it for granted. So, you consistently have to think and plan and change. It’s engaging! You always have to reinvent and I think that’s really useful. It's important to give people the power to choose. After all, education is power. \
2. Are other forms of art/ expression of interest to you? If so, which ones and why?
Yes, there are two. Actually, I think there may be three. So, the visual arts is a big thing in my life. I remember one of my earliest memories as a really small child is crawling around the floor of my playroom and there's this book by Berenson, who is one of the great art historians. But I love music too. I play the piano and the flute, and I find a certain emotional connection with music. And I've also always loved dancing — I love ballet. If I'd really been what I wanted to be, I would have been a ballet dancer. I just love the idea of the physical movement of dance music.
3. Who is your favourite dead female writer and modern female writer? Why?
Okay, so, George Eliot is favourite dead female writer because she's enormously intelligent and enormously insightful about human beings. I think if you're interested in the effects of literature on women, she has so many interesting things to say about that. To start, she’s had to call herself George Eliot rather than Mary Ann Evans. And that whole business of standing out against societal norms — she was so passionate about it. She refused to get married. I think she was also so authentic: she spoke for herself. I find her hugely impressive. And the books! They are such great stories.
Then, in terms of my favourite modern writer, I particularly admire Ali Smith at the moment. I think the ‘Seasonal quartet’ is extraordinary. And in a way, I think I admire her for some of the same reasons, I admire George Eliot, I think she understands what books can do. So, she is extraordinarily acute on contemporary events, where it comes from and how it relates to the past. She's got that trick. I've got this Ezra Pound quote, where he says, “literature is news that stays news.” And she has that idea of being able to take those moments of immediate history and locate them in the whole scope of human experience, which I think is extraordinary. So, she's my modern pick for the time being.
4. How can books impact culture?
So, I think they can be quite symbiotic. Books can both reflect and shape culture. In terms of books that have changed culture, there are two that come to mind. First of all, ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir, essentially said women are more than just their reproductive organs, which was quite a revolutionary thing at the time. You know, that was a really important moment to open the door and say to women, you don't have to just produce babies to be worth it. Then, the other one, I think, is Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’. An extraordinary response to his moment in history. I think the fact that he could explain natural selection and evolution wasn't dependent on a supernatural being was really, really important. So those books, I think, are superb examples of what books can achieve.
4. What was your dream as a child and what is your dream now? Has it changed?
My dream as a child was to write probably plays — I loved the theatre. Has it changed? Yes, I think it probably has. I still adore the theatre actually but I love what I do now. I love being a teacher. I love running the department. But I'm also quite old. So I'm going to have to think about what I'm going to do next, which I'll tell you about later.
5. Who is your biggest role model?
My parents. Without a doubt, do you want me to tell you why? Okay, so, both my parents were very strong characters — they'd been brought up in the war. So, for them, making a very close knit family was really important. Firstly, my mother was one of these people who always had time for her children. So, I think [I got] the idea [from her] that it is important to have time for people and to be kind to people. My father was, likewise, absolutely brilliant. He was an English teacher and he always talked to me about books — I've always admired him hugely.
6. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Well, I'm quite old. In 10 years, I will be retired, so, I will go back to university. I want to do a degree in History of Art. So, in 10 years, I'd like to see myself as some kind of expert in art history. That's where I see myself.
5. What challenges have you faced so far in your career?
That's a really tricky one. I've been extraordinarily lucky because I think in education, there are more opportunities for women than in some other professions. Having said that, when I first started working, school was a far more misogynistic place. I remember a teacher in the English department asking me if I'd read Thomas Hardy and thinking, for goodness sake! Nobody would say that now. Personally, I think that the biggest barrier is myself. And I think this is really important for girls to hear actually. In my generation, there was a cultural assumption about what women could and could not do. And, you know, I look back now, and I suspect I have consistently underrated my ability to do things partially because of that. It took me well into my fifties when I realised that I was actually quite capable of doing stuff. And occasionally, that makes me sad. Having said that, I absolutely love what I do. So, I wouldn't change it or regret it. But what I would say to people of the current generation is that “you can do it.” I think boys still tend to assume that they can do stuff, and girls assume that perhaps they can't. a cultural shift in that mindset would be a very good thing, I think.
6. Are there specific obstacles you think female writers face?
Well, again, I think this is such an interesting question which I’ll give you quite a complicated answer. If you look at the statistics, certainly in terms of literary fiction, more women are published than men now. I think, though, that the publishing houses are still misogynistic because I think the reason that women are published more is that more women buy books. So, I think it’s not necessarily about wanting to open the doors to inclusion and diversity. I think it's far more to do with what books can they sell. And I think, you know, of course, publishing houses have to make money out of books. But I think it's very economically driven overall. And if I come back to Ali Smith, you know, she is perhaps not that commercial on paper, but actually, because her books are really good, they have made publishing companies a lot of money. Besides that, I think another obstacle is literary tropes. So, you know, a limitation on what women are supposed to write about. Because, once again, there is this assumption that women are going to want to read about shopping and men and shoes. And then, of course, there's still a lot of historic baggage. So, you know, the idea that JK Rowling didn't use a female name, because she thought she wouldn't be taken seriously. Stuff like that.
7. For a long time, female characters were wholly written from a male perspective because almost every famous writer was a man. Consequently, the concept of femininity and how a woman ought to be were dictated by men, dismissing the opinions and thoughts of real women. This made women see themselves through the lens of a man too — we call this the ‘male gaze’ today. Personally, I find myself often trying to unlearn what books I read growing up told me were cool or aspirational. Was there a moment or time when you realised the detrimental impact of misleading books?
I think that's a really difficult question. I mean, I think it depends on what books you're reading. I'm not going to answer your question directly, which is really annoying. But I was thinking about how there are a lot of very great 19th-century women writers. More specifically, I was thinking two things about them. I thought, of course, they were about the male gaze. But actually, some of the really great books like ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Emma’ are about independent women. And I think you know, those writers were struggling with exactly what you're talking about. So, you can say on the one hand, yes, they're really interested in the idea of female independence. But of course, what happens at the end of both those books is that the protagonists get married. So, I think my moment of revelation then was to think, yes, of course, this all very complex. On one hand, these books are talking about how splendid these independent women are. But on the other hand, they have to come into the fold and they have to get married.