LIGHTS OUT DIANA LOOKS LIKE BATHSHEBA TV

Oh yes, I knew it was vain, but how could I not care, when every pop song, magazine, film or TV programme was telling me that a woman is empowered by her beauty? I wanted some of that power. I would try to hold my face in a way that made it look more like a face in a magazine, smooth, passive, appealing (chin down, eyes up – think Princess Diana). No wonder I checked myself in mirrors all the time, but, unlike Bathsheba, it wasn't to admire myself, it was out of anxiety. And so the male gaze, or so it seemed, was on us at every moment. Classes were small and we sat in the round, often 10 boys to two girls. We sensed them sizing us up from their study windows. To make things worse, the various houses were arranged around a small private courtyard, and this space became as much a showcase as Bathsheba's wagon. The school had only recently started to accept a small number of girls and we were rare and exotic creatures among the libidinous adolescent boys in their tight black suits.

This venerable public school, nestled into the precinct of Westminster Abbey, was – in those days (the 1980s) at any rate – a hotbed of febrile sexuality. I think it was a wise act, giving me FFTMC to read – but still I squirmed – and was fascinated by it and didn't understand it. He was called Jim Cogan and he strode around the school with his gown flapping behind him like some kind of scholastic superhero. I remember feeling an incoherent embarrassment mixed with discomfort when I read this scene under the disapproving male gaze of my sixth form English teacher. And – just to twist the screw one more time – she is roundly criticised for doing so: 'Woman's prescriptive infirmity had stalked into the sunlight.' But also – the second version – Bathsheba looks at her own reflection through the eyes, we are told, of the men who may approve of her in the future. This is the first version of the male gaze.

This was written 100 years before second-wave feminism thought to coin the phrase 'the male gaze', but what better illustration of the male gaze could there be? Oak, a 28-year-old bachelor whose mind is turning to marriage, clearly looks on Bathsheba in the lane (a scene of 'peculiar vernal charm') as an erotic object. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind.' The reader is then invited to imagine that her thoughts might be of 'dramas in which men would play a part – vistas of probable triumphs'. To pass the time, she pulls out a small looking glass and surveys herself attentively: 'She did not adjust her hat, or pat her hair, or press a dimple into shape, or do one thing to signify that any such intention had been her motive in taking up the glass. When her waggoner runs back to pick up a lost tailboard, Bathsheba is left waiting for a moment. Gabriel Oak, who is in the fields, can see her above the hedge and she doesn't know that he is watching.

My favourite moment in Far from the Madding Crowd is when Bathsheba Everdene is riding high along the lanes, both literally and figuratively, on top of a cart piled up with furniture.

Lights out diana looks like bathsheba