The honorary degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred upon Eva Figes on 17 July 2002. The citation, read by the Public Orator, Professor M Moran, was as follows:
"Chancellor, I would like to introduce our Honorary Graduand today with a generalization, the kind of sweeping statement normally queried by academics in research papers but much loved by them in the classroom. In this case, the generalization, I believe, has particular merit because it happens to be true. And the generalization is this: Eva Figes has touched the life of everyone present in the hall today – yes, everyone.
"In the first place, as Arts Council Creative Writing Fellow at Brunel University from 1977-79, she played an important role in shaping the expectations and breadth of this University in its early years. She highlighted the value of creativity and self-expression as a vital part of the educational process, for students of whatever subject. In many ways, she provided the rationale for the expanded range of subjects we have in the University today, including the Creative Writing programme based in the Department of English. Nationally and internationally she was one of the foremost voices in the Women’s Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s and, as such, made a significant contribution to the social and cultural debate concerning the needs, expectations and rights of women in society, a debate which, I’m sure you will agree, has affected men as well as women, legislation as well as domestic behaviours. And she has been a persuasive practitioner and champion of new fictional styles which have influenced contemporary British writing. She unites the best of Modernism and the British avant garde with a more adventurous European understanding of the power of the novel form, the special truth of the literary imagination.
"Eva Figes was born in Berlin and came as a young child to England as a refugee in 1939 after her father’s release from a concentration camp. In Little Eden, her evocative memoir about her evacuation to Cirencester during the war, the reader can find a number of the literary and social principles and values which underpin her many achievements. To begin with, this autobiographical work is a marvellous blend of local history and personal recollection, of childlike wonder and adult perceptiveness. But this is no fond idealized memory of an idyllic childhood. The violent and irrational world of war tempers the narrator’s life journey at every stage. And this distinctive collage – with the sun on the surface, the horror just hidden under the skin - perfectly suggests the strangeness of wartime displacement for a sensitive child, and uncannily renders it familiar to the reader too. But in addition to such literary magic, there are other seminal themes which this autobiography highlights and which provide a framework for our reflection on Eva Figes’s many achievements: her fascination with the beauty and power of language; her respect for individual identity; her wholehearted commitment to freedom for the individual and for neglected social groups.
"In Little Eden Eva Figes describes her yearning at school “to indulge in unlawful pleasures under the bedclothes” – by which, I hasten to explain, she means reading in bed late at night under the covers with a torch. This was not so much a streak of rebellion – though it is partly a streak of staunch independence and courage to depart from the status quo which has made her so potent a political and literary voice. Rather, it was a sign of her love affair with words from the very early stages of her life, a deep attraction which spurred her to read widely and write poems and stories. While still at school, Eva Figes had a vision of becoming a writer, a process which she imagined as “years spent collecting all the wonderful words in the world in a huge thick book of blank white pages.” And so she did, becoming one of our key literary novelists of the late twentieth-century with an output of 13 novels, together with other fiction and non-fiction writing.
"After studying at Queen Mary College of the University of London, she worked in publishing; but in 1966 realized her writerly ambitions with the publication of Equinox, a lyrical examination of the fragmentation of identity. In her other novels, like The Seven Ages, Nelly’s Version, and Days, her poetic preoccupation with the mystique of language can be seen in the brilliant realisation of the texture, impressions and processes of inner consciousness. In particular her works explore that intangible disconnection between language and the flux of the individual’s experience, the nature of his or her memory. It is for exactly these talents that her novel, Winter Journey, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1967. Eva Figes’s work has consistently been recognized by critics and reviewers as the output of “a beautiful and unusual writer”.
"Words are an important tool of expressing a sense of self. Eva Figes has described her own sense of identity as “a secret, solitary nucleus inside which nobody could reach. It held pain, but also dreams, and I needed to be withdrawn to allow it to grow.” Such withdrawal might involve painful choices; but it certainly involves the rejection of false identities and imposed labels. It is here that Eva Figes has made another important intervention in shaping social as well as literary perceptions in the post-war period. Never describing herself as a follower of the Women’s Liberation movement, she nonetheless has been a significant voice in demonstrating the economic, legal and cultural forces which limit women’s opportunities and achievements. In Patriarchal Attitudes, a seminal 1970 historical exploration of women’s place in society, she tackled head-on the kinds of attitude that prompted the Charlie Chaplins of this world to believe “Every woman needs a man to discover her.” Eva Figes persuasively demonstrated the social and cultural domination of women, and the tragic consequences for individuals as well as society at large. “Sadly,” she wrote, “man recognises that the ideal, submissive woman he has created for himself is somehow not quite what he wanted.” Nor does her argument for women’s rights really turn them into “pseudo men.” She called for an end to the brain drain down the kitchen drain, and argued convincingly that women must have the freedom – economic, emotional, and legal - to develop their own lives and take part on equal terms in the world of work without discrimination based on gender.
"As part of my research for this oration, I talked to many scholars, writers, friends, and broadcasters about Patriarchal Attitudes. “Could not have written my dissertation without it”, said one; “inspirational,” said another; “shaming, and rightly so,” responded a male interviewee. Most importantly the women I spoke to praised the book for its inspiration, for it gave them courage to realise they had dreams and could seize them. There is no doubt that Eva Figes has changed our lives and changed our society. And it is also the case that her impact continues. She once responded in an interview that she didn’t seek a high media profile: “I made my point with Patriarchal Attitudes, “ she said. But her daughter Kate has continued her exploration of the action still needed, most notably in her recent book on the myth of equality for women in Britain.
"When Eva Figes reflected on her first year as Creative Writing Fellow at Brunel, she described the initial reaction to her as presence as one of surprise, perhaps given the scientific and technological specialization of the University at that time. But she was touched by her reception; “People listened to what I had to say,” she wrote, and appeared to have gained something from it.” Well, that was a perceptive and prescient comment in many ways. Eva Figes has continued to nourish and revive our country, offering us her stunning grace of language, penetrating intelligence and real understanding for the insecure, the marginalized, the excluded and forgotten. She has the imaginative gifts that enable her to capture the unsayable for a moment, make the prosaic startle, the comfortable disturb. Above all, she has those qualities of which our country is most proud - a fierce integrity and deep honesty as well as a perceptive grasp of what is and a compassionate vision of what could be better.
Chancellor, it gives me great pleasure to present to you Eva Figes, for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa."
DLitt - July 2002
