Sarah Perry’s latest publication, “Essex Girls: For Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere”, is a tiny little book based on a Harriet Martineau lecture she gave; it’s an entertaining read for any woman who doesn’t like to shut up.
Sarah Perry is best known for her second novel “The Essex Serpent” and is herself is an Essex girl, born in Chelmsford. One of my favourite lines in the book – and this was originally a speech, after all – is her description of Essex as “those 1,420 square, flat miles stuck between London and the sea”.
Perry remembers growing up with the Essex girl trope at the edge of her consciousness. The Oxford English Dictionary contends that this use of the phrase originated in 1991, but Perry used a Google NGRAM tool to demonstrate its development from 1989. She claims it is “more or less a construction of the Thatcherite era”.
Perhaps this book is a stab at an Essex girl manifesto. “What is an Essex girl, if not a woman who cares nothing at all for a good reputation?" writes Perry. "I began to understand that perhaps she was feared and despised because, having rejected one female duty, she was better equipped to reject them all.”
Like me, Sarah Perry was raised as a Strict Baptist, and you would think there could be nothing further from an Essex girl than a bookish little Puritan maid avidly devouring the Scriptures. But education gives rise to rebellion against injustice. She writes: “From that chapel pulpit and in those chapel pews only men were ever heard to pray, or to speak, or to read aloud from the Bible…[the faith] required me to be obedient to men, and to hold my tongue in church…I was taller and stronger than the few boys I knew, and if not cleverer I certainly thought I was: was I really to be pliant, and acquiescent, when this ran so counter to my nature?”
The Puritan Maid by Edith Maud Susanna Scannell. Photo credit: Lady Lever Art Gallery
Given our similar Strict Baptist upbringing, it’s not surprising that the names and themes Perry clocks are those which invariably draw my eye: “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”; the persecution of women; witchfinder Matthew Hopkins; and Harriet Martineau herself, member of a fine and extensive Huguenot dynasty much celebrated in Norwich.
Unlike the archetypal Essex girl, this book is a bit thin. It was first of all a lecture, so that explains the paucity of breadth and depth; in my view, the publishers should have given Perry time, and a brief, to widen her remit. I felt cheated that some of the examples of female feistiness were Essex girls only in spirit; Emily Hobhouse in particular seemed to be shoe-horned in, and is in some ways the archetype’s antithesis, since she was an upper middle-class pacifist from Cornwall. The trope of the Essex girl surely depends upon her being a member of the lumpen underclass, at least by birth.
Journalist Harriet Martineau, abolitionist Anne Knight, Protestant martyr Rose Allin – none of these were dirt-poor women, nor were they promiscuous. A distillation of sexism, Essex girls are meant to be endlessly “up for it” – they embody a highly sexualised version of womanhood.
In contrast, Perry is drawn to the supernatural and the disembodied. She invokes ghosts in a way that allows her latitude in her choice of subjects; her ghosts glide from county to county in order to claim a place in this book.
Nonetheless, I would rather she had devoted the chapter on Emily Hobhouse to the indomitable Sky News reporter Beth Rigby, who is consigned to a footnote. Rigby is genuinely an Essex girl, born in Colchester – a loud woman with a large, red lipsticked mouth and an inability to pronounce the final “g” of gerunds. She rudely jostles and shouts questions at politicians outside No. 10 Downing Street – they are mainly men. In the footnote she is given, an interview with The Observer (May 2020) is quoted: “I thought I’d poshed-up my accent at Cambridge. But then I joined the FT…A colleague, who was very posh, took the mickey out of the fact that I can’t pronounce my Gs. I was absolutely crushed.” She found Sky News a more hospitable place for her pronunciation; however, she is currently suspended from her job for having broken Covid rules at a party thrown by that other fearsome reporter Kay Burley.
Perry concludes her book by saying that all the women she includes are “Essex girl territory… They are what it means to be disreputable, disrespectful, disobedient; to speak out of turn, and too loudly, and too often; to be irritable and irritating; to be bodies which are distasteful and inconvenient; to be a thorn in the flesh of the established and the ruling classes; to be at liberty”.
Essex Girls: For Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere
Read more about Sarah Perry, Strict Baptists and “The Essex Serpent”
Another interesting blog that sent me off on my own voyage of discovery. For me the term Essex Girl conjures up Jade Goody and her transition from being a subject of derision to tragic heroine. And so I wondered whether the other lands of the Saxons, the other ‘sexes’ had their own stereotyped girls and boys. Coming from Sussex I was unaware that there was indeed a Sussex girl/boy. We have have fared rather better, at least according to the Urban Dictionary – Sussex girls and boys are ‘hot, likes to think they’re left wing and are probably a bit posh. Well spoken, nice hair, reads Kerouac or Kafta’. I expect these specimens originate more from Brighton than my home town of Bexhill; perceptively described as somewhere ‘no-one in their right mind would want to go, it is full of old people and sometimes referred to as ‘god’s waiting room’.’
It seems that for Essex Girls and girls from Bexhill there may always be something to be overcome in their origins.
Once again, a fine post Jo and your choice of picture so apposite. I love the wistful look of this beautiful young woman, dreaming, looking away from her book- presumably, the bible. Her gaze off to a distant place, the glimmering of an idea but also of a passivity, an acceptance of the rootedness of her reality as she holds her book to herself.
I agree with you that it was a shame Perry did not talk more about real Essex Women or (Essex) Mondeo man etc and felt like you, let down in this respect. I did like the reference to Rebecca Solnit’s quote about the fact that change is not (yet) irrevocable is not a failure…‘A woman goes walking down a thousand mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has 999 miles to go and will never get anywhere.’
I gave birth to my first son in St John’s Hospital, Chelmsford, the starting point of Perry’s Essex Girls, He has never forgiven me for the ten days which condemned him to be forever name-called an ‘Essex Man’ if his origins seep out, victim of the intellectual snobbery of Cambridge.
I do wonder whether the Essex Man/ (more than) Woman was not a construct born of Thatcher’s ‘property owning democracy’ overture to an element in Essex: the aspiring working class, the ‘jack-the-lad’ (or Jill) entrepreneurial individualist, go-getter who like her, cared nothing for the collectivism of the striking dockers or miners in the 70s and 80s. By the late 80s most had long forgotten the struggles of the Dagenham women and collectivism was for the birds. They were sassy, independent, out for a good time and many voted Tory if they voted at all.
Yes to your last paragraph! How funny your son was born at the hospital in Chelmsford so central to the book!
Thank you, Jo. I love your blogs, your writing is so light yet penetrating. You always make me want to read the book, yet you give a very specific – but fair – critique. Overall always a balanced piece and delightful to read. I was aware of the Essex girl trope from the 1980s onwards – yes a very unfair and sexist sterotype. And, like you, I agree Sarah Perry’s publisher should have given more time to make the most of her theme.
It was your mention of the ‘dropped g’ that set me running to my browser. I always thought of it as an upper class ‘thing’ – as in Bertie Wooster. I now find that it occurs in a number of accents of different varieties, including Cockney as well as ‘country aristocracy’. Interestin’!
Hephzi- you remind me. I remember the dropped ‘g’ of Just William (as read by….who? I forget) on the story-tapes we gave our children…their best electronic minders. We have a local antique dealer who speaks with aristocratic dropped ‘g’s. Wealthy but from the borders of North Essex and Suffolk, his Essex links have seeped through. Our name for him? Just William.
I think Martin Jarvis read the Just William books. He seems to specialise in audiobooks. The soundtrack of our children’s pre-teen lives!
We naturally dropped our “g”s as children but quickly learnt at our middle class, direct grant school to pick them up again.
Another fascinating entry, Huguenot Jo!
I hate the way stereotypes box people in but have to admit that this particular one has quite a lot of resonance for me. It might have something to do with the fact that I began my teaching career in Basildon – quite a few years before the genesis of the expression but it chimes with my experience of the county and its people. I admired so much about their grit, their orneriness, their loudness and determination to have a good time but it made teaching their children v v tough. Maybe being m/c in a v w/c, ex East End of London town emphasised how we are class bound or as you put it, we expect them to be part of the lumpen proletariat. I got out after 3 years in which I learned a lot, especially that Essex and I weren’t going to make each other happy long term. What worries me more than the fact that the trope is classist is that it’s picking on the women. Again, I admire that loudness, the desire to speak out, the laddettishness which you see in TOWIE. They ask you to take them as they are even if you don’t agree with it. I find Essex man much more of a problem. I still have friends in Essex and when I go there I feel that some of the blokes are really chauvinistic.
I do wonder about the link you make between education giving rise to rebellion against injustice and religious upbringing. Don’t you think that a strict religious education has exactly the opposite aim? Or perhaps I am just misreading what you were saying.
I did follow the link to the article about the removal of the term from the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary which defined Essex girl as ‘not intelligent, dresses badly, talks in a loud and ugly way and is v willing to have sex’. I can see why they campaigned to have it removed but I always worry about this kind of censorship of language. Are advanced students of English not able to understand stereotyping and derogatory expressions?
Lots of food for thought in your blog, as ever… thank you.
A religious education only goes so far. If the child finds a teacher outside the religion, they may be enouraged to think independently. That is the death knell of religious fundamentalism and its oppression of women.
I hesitate to comment given the focus of the post and the fact – to which I must own – that I am a man. There again there was ‘Essex Man’ as well as ‘Essex Girl’ which may justify my doing so? I thought Sarah Perry’s “The Essex Serpent” a wonderful and rather disturbing fable, I am less sure I would ‘take’ to her latest book. But as with other Huguenotjo posts I enjoyed this one because of its fluent writing and crisply sharp turn of phrase. Nonetheless I have to admit that Perry and the post do not make ‘Essex Girl’ an attractive specimen, at least to my mind. No more so than ‘Essex Man’, though his image is quite different, more of the political right and more ‘on the make’. Poor Essex to have attracted such disobliging images in the 1990s! But surely notwithstanding Perry’s seeming championing of a the Girl version, if not the Man one, these caricatures have – like the Mondeo the Man was said to have driven – have past their sell-by dates?
You are right about sell-by dates, and I had forgotten reports just before Xmas that “a dictionary” – the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary – had dropped the term: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-removed-from-dictionary-following-campaign
Perry reclaims rather than champions the Essex Girl trope, more or less claiming she is everywoman, which I think is stretching a point. She remarks that, as stereotyped, both left and right despise the Essex girl – the former for her materialism and the latter for her wanton lifestyle.
I take your reservations about Sarah Perry’s pamphlet. Nevertheless, if territory and class can be bypassed, perhaps we could include a number of Australian women in the Essex girl category as defined by Perry: germaine Greer, Carmen Callie, Kathy Letts come to mind. But for me the best example of the Essex girl as defined by Perry is seen in the Dagenham strike. The film did quite well in commemorating those women.
As always I enjoyed reading your blog with its wry wit, and wanted to follow up the links. I would also have liked to know more about how Perry saw the definition as a construction of the Thatcher era.
As ever, you make some great points. I think the Thatcher element refers to the trope of feckless women acquiring offspring with a view to council housing; this was a common Daily Mail theme in the 1980s and of course then council housing was massively sold off to people who appeared to have more lofty ambitions.