The Countess Granville, in a letter of 1827, is effusive about a greyhound named Flora of which she is ‘excessively fond’. She has for the dog a ‘peculiar weakness’, for ‘all her ways, the sleepy affected grande dame manner’.



Grande Dame-nation, as the Countess knew, is hardly value-neutral. The term simpers and winks. It adverts to haughtiness. ‘[I]mposing’, the OED offers hesitantly, addenda to the sense of rank, prestige and venerability; ‘dignified; condescending’. In so implying condescension, the label condescends – an elegant, disavowable sneer. In a grande dame’s dignity, protested of too much, is something undignified. There is elegance there, yes, but is it not a little stiff? Even strained? The wry knowingness that deploys the term domesticates and undermines as it purports to admiration. ‘Grande dame’, the OED assures, comes with an ‘accompanying sense of respect and affection’ – but the latter carefully undercuts the former.

A grande dame is above all a woman. And old. And thus domesticated. She is even, the term assures sotto voce, however stern she might seem, rather a dear old thing, really.

The most obvious act of disciplining in this obituary headline is in words 8 and 9, ‘science’ and ‘fiction’. Le Guin herself, to be sure, never apologised for that field, and nor should anyone celebrating her. But given the respect she doggedly and belatedly accrued beyond it in literature tout court – a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, burgeoning and deserved rumbles around the Nobel – one might think it a bit much to put her posthumously back in the box.

Far worse, however, are words five and six.



In her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, Le Guin trenchantly attacked capitalism itself – just as she had many times before. ‘I don’t think anyone expected an 85-year-old lady … to get up there and say those things,’ she later said. And now such words must come as a surprise again. Because it is not only an old lady but a grand [sic] dame who has died. All stiff brocade and starch and sweeping skirts. A dear old thing.

——–

Shall we try that commemoration again?

An unflinching radical has died. A literary colossus has died. A comrade, a giant of modern letters has died.

