She was an outsider, and as such a disrupter. Was she a feminist? Not in the modern sense, though an idea of female power as a protean force was central to her thinking, as it was to the writers she loved: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Central, too, was her disdain for the false power of churches, fathers, governments, God, ego. (…)
The fringe for her was a position of strength, not deprivation. This truth should not be lost in the rebranding campaigns periodically conducted on her behalf. Nor should it be forgotten that defending difference took a lifelong fight, one which she was willing and able — supremely able — to wage.
“How martial is this place!/Had I a mighty gun/I think I’d shoot the human race/And then to glory run!”
That’s a revolutionary talking. And her voice carries, subaudibly explosive, through this show.
