Girlhood and boyhood, at least until quite recently, have often been treated as separate, different and unequal in children's literature. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century children's books are full of strong, active boy characters, and much more submissive, domestic and introspective girls. But equally prevalent, even if sometimes less immediately obvious, has been a recurrent expression of the flimsiness and artificiality of the division between boys and girls, and of the desire of many protagonists to contravene the gender identities enjoined on them. Many favourite characters from children's books either long to defy the simple gender categorisation imposed on them as members of the Anglo-American middle classes, or actually actively transgress the roles assigned to them. Here, for instance, is Georgina, speaking out in the first of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books:

George epitomises both the sharp division between the social construction of girls and boys and the longing to cross the divide. Wearing shorts, with cropped curly hair and refusing to answer to her given name, this dogged eleven-year-old is determined to dodge the female role in which biology has cast her.

Introduction

As in other countries in Africa, there are two parallel and competing histories of land tenure in Uganda. The indigenous systems evolved to suit the needs of different local groups, or at least certain elite members in those groups, in a variety of different ecological and economic circumstances. They worked on rules which have never been written down, making it easy for outsiders to consider all these systems as ‘customary tenure’ a single, unchanging system of rules and administration. Another, written, history began with British colonialism. The British introduced a system of freehold title under which client chiefs and kingdoms (as well as missions) were granted formal land rights. All land which was not registered was considered by the British to be ‘crown land’. Although customary tenure continued to operate on this land, the customary owners had little protection from the arbitrary expropriation of their property. The British colonial administrators regarded customary ownership as backward and a constraint to economic development, which by the 1950s they intended to replace with the ‘modern’ system of freehold. However, colonialism ended before this could be implemented.

On independence in 1962, crown land became public land, which made little difference to most people. The old colonial opinions on the primitiveness of customary tenure were deeply engrained (and remain so today, as we shall see). As a result, Uganda, like many other newly independent countries, experimented with nationalizing land, another way of trying to replace the ‘backwardness’ of customary tenure with a ‘modern’ system. This was supposed to allow for more ‘rational’ allocation of land. Still, the customary tenure systems continued to operate, though without legal status. From 1975, with the Land Reform Decree, land owners were effectively merely the occupiers of their land, which they held ‘under sufferance’ – meaning that possession of their land could be taken by the government whenever it wanted. Some land was indeed taken and given on leasehold to people who would now be termed ‘investors’ – in practice often civil servants, businessmen or those with political connections. The real ‘owners’ of the land had no rights at all.

More recently, nationalization of land and other natural resources went out of favour in Uganda as in the rest of the world, and the ‘backwardness’ of customary tenure is instead now contrasted with the assumed superiority of private individual freehold.

What Remains to be Done?

With this book we have tried to offer a nuanced picture of how the issues of privatization, gender relations and land rights are currently interacting in Eastern Africa as a contribution to the debate on how women's rights can best be secured in the overarching context of the increasing ‘privatization’ of land tenure. The detailed and differentiated analysis of what is happening on the ground that has been presented herein points up once more the continuing invalidity of some of the more common assumptions about women's rights to land in Eastern Africa, and the limits to securing them through policy and legislation alone. Women are not powerless actors, and the case study chapters of this volume in particular have provided ample illustration of the multiple and creative ways which women have found to claim and ensure their rights to land. We therefore hope that, collectively, we have provided fresh inspiration to all those who are in a position to change the situation for the better. It remains only to ask: What still needs to be done? How can women best be supported in their continuing struggles over land?

Drawing on all the contributions to this volume, and co-authored by all the contributors, this Afterword therefore aims to suggest the best ways forward in securing land rights for women. In the following sections, we first make some general observations about the impact of land tenure privatization on women's land rights thus far, and then examine how the new policies and laws address women's rights. In drawing together our conclusions we focus, first, on the best ways to implement the new policies and laws and, second, on the importance of civil society in supporting women's land rights more broadly.

“We haven't got father, and shall not have him for a long time,” says Jo sadly as the four March sisters cluster around the family hearth at the start of Little Women (1868). From its very first page, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is demonstrably a book about women existing in a world without men. Framed by the action of the American Civil War, the story creates a nineteenth-century space in which women can legitimately take on male roles while the able-bodied breadwinners – husbands, fathers, sons, and lovers – are away from home at the battlefields. As the sisters gather at the fireside in an act of communal reading to hear the letter from father who is “far away, where the fighting was” (11), the text dramatically illustrates the importance of the written word that gives presence to what is absent.

This chapter examines the cinematic representation of this dysfunctional world and the accompanying exploration of female autonomy in Little Women. In this context, it considers, too, the specific role of writing and reading in the novel as offering a route to female independence, both mental and material, and the ambivalent treatment this receives on screen. For whereas the novel is packed with literary allusions and forcefully conveys the potency of literature as a survival mechanism, film has tended to present Little Women in a much milder light as a sentimental story for girls, its subject that of the American family and the socialization and triumph of its unruly heroine.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NOVEL

‘Everything I think I have discovered about the jungle of the human heart has gone into it’, wrote Rosamond Lehmann to Bernard Berenson about her new novel. The Echoing Grove was completed during the period of fallout from Lehmann's long affair with the poet, Cecil Day Lewis. Throughout the 1940s, Rosamond and Cecil, handsome, gifted and successful, were the golden couple of literary London. Although their private life was frequently under strain, largely stemming from Day Lewis's refusal to divorce his long-suffering wife, Mary, it was also joyous and mutually satisfying, both intellectually and emotionally, and the pair were accepted everywhere as an established union. When in 1950 Day Lewis, without warning, went off with the actress, Jill Balcon, whom he subsequently married, Lehmann was reduced to a state of shock, insisting, until she could no longer ignore the fact, that his defection was a temporary neurotic lapse, ‘a far more acute form of the psychopathic state I've seen him in at intervals for 9 years’. She remained adamant that the break-up was too traumatic for her ever to write about but despite her denials, the lasting anguish and bitterness resulting from what she referred to as ‘the biggest disaster of my life’ inevitably shaped the predominant mood of The Echoing Grove, the final novel of her artistic maturity. ‘It is one of the most unmitigatedly painful books I have ever read’, commented John Lehmann, always her most astute reader. ‘It is terrific and terrible; because such writing could only come out of the most terrible suffering’.

Lehmann had begun work on the novel shortly after the publication of The Ballad and the Source but it had been re-drafted extensively over the years, and revised further after the break with Day Lewis, at which point Lehmann reported that ‘picking up this novel again was a spiritual torment for which there are no words’. It took her two more years to finish. Set in the present day, the book gives voice to that ‘spiritual torment’ as it delineates the destructive power of an erotic triangle over a twenty-year period. The story, told mostly in flashback and switching between the consciousnesses of the main characters, reviews the lives of two sisters, Madeleine and Dinah, and their relationship with Rickie, the husband of one and lover of the other.

‘I wish I were a writer’, confesses Hugh Miller impulsively in A Note in Music (1930). ‘Sort of get things out of oneself couldn't one?’(NiM, 177). Rosamond Lehmann's fiction gives voice to the deepest of intimate experiences, powerful, secret and often painful. When Sibyl Jardine, that supreme teller of tales in The Ballad and the Source (1944) concedes that, ‘Truth is my foible’, the voice could be Lehmann's own. Friend and fellow novelist, Anita Brookner, observed that Lehmann's ‘greatest attribute is her straightforwardness, her candour’. Emotional honesty was at the heart of her appeal, one reason her books resonated with readers across generations. ‘Miss Lehmann. How did you know? – This is my story exactly!’ (WS, introduction), enthused women fans. Equally, as a sophisticated exponent of late modernism, Lehmann was insistent that she wrote ‘to show there is not one truth about anything’. Her fiction lays bare its emotional centre in an extraordinarily personal way as it dissects a society struggling to come to terms with a world of conflicting imperatives. At the same time her storytelling is always immediate, engaging and often hilarious. Simultaneously subjective and ironic, anti-establishment and traditional, ethereal and pragmatic, her writing displays the contradictory impulses that bridge the gap between the mainstream narrative tradition and a twentieth-century modernist consciousness.

Lehmann's literary reputation rests on six major novels whose strong subject matter frequently exposed her to the charge of emotional excess. Such was their impact that she was acclaimed internationally as ‘the greatest living novelist’ and ‘a genius to be compared with Tolstoy’. Although some critics, both at the time and subsequently, found it tempting to classify Lehmann as a ‘women's novelist’, her rarified sensibility ‘almost too femininely subtle and shifting’, such categorization is simplistic. As a contemporary reviewer noted, ‘Rosamond Lehmann is of course a woman. All the major characters of her story are women. Women will be its most passionate readers. Men … yet recognize that rare phenomenon: a distinguished novel which might have been written a decade ago, and that will be as intriguing a decade hence.’ Whilst her books’ exploration of feminine psychology was unparallelled, to fix their scrutiny of twentieth-century society to just one of its many dimensions ignores the wider resonance of the work, which unpicks the fabric of modern life to reveal the troubled psyche within.

A NOTE IN MUSIC

‘I … feel like a non-too-fresh vegetable,’ commented Lehmann after the success of Dusty Answer. ‘It is depressing & I keep on hearing of people who say: “Of course I always knew she'd never write more than one book.” Brrr! I'll show ‘em, - and produce a genius into the bargain.’ The ‘genius’ was a playful reference to the birth of her son, Hugo, who arrived in August 1929, a few months before the appearance of A Note in Music early the following year. Readers who had hoped for a continuation of the breathless ardour that had characterized Lehmann's first book were disappointed. A Note in Music is relentlessly downbeat, echoing the inertia of its central character, Grace Fairfax, who drifts through a bleak marriage with little to occupy her days or her interest. The mood mirrored the despondency of Lehmann's own early married life in northern provincial cities, when, away from the warmth of her family and her stylish, cosmopolitan friends, she felt singularly bereft of intellectual companionship and sympathy.

In April 1928 on holiday in the south of France, she reported dejectedly, ‘I have written a sort of prelude or first section and am now stuck, & feel rather gloomy – But I'm hoping light will be vouchsafed to me soon’. Positive encouragement was forthcoming from Virginia Woolf, an admirer of Dusty Answer, whose searching questions may well have provoked Lehmann to think in new directions. ‘Are you writing about the same people’, enquired Woolf, ‘or have you come out in an entire new world from which you see all the old world, minute, miles & miles away?’ Woolf's words were uncannily prophetic. The sense of promise held out to Judith Earle at the end of Dusty Answer is withdrawn in Lehmann's next work, juvenile exuberance just an elusive memory for a new heroine whose decade of marital tedium is deficient in emotional and sexual fulfilment. It is likely that the starry-eyed relationship with Wogan Philipps in her own life also forced Lehmann to reflect with caustic distance on the lacunae in her marriage to Leslie Runciman.