Happiness Quote by Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope lands the punch with a setup that sounds like a genteel literary panel question, then reveals the ugly premise underneath: women’s happiness is treated as a threat to their artistic legitimacy. The line’s slyness is in how it frames “a question” as if it were natural, even reasonable, while quietly indicting the culture that keeps asking it. Tragedy, here, isn’t just a genre preference; it’s an expectation, almost a tax. If you’re a woman writer, the world wants your pain to be productive.

The subtext cuts two ways. First, it skewers the romantic myth that good writing requires suffering, a myth that’s conveniently selective about whose suffering counts as “material.” Second, it points to the gendered suspicion of women’s authority: if her work isn’t stamped with trauma, is she serious enough, deep enough, real enough? Cope’s phrasing - “good supply” - makes tragedy sound like a pantry item, commodified and endlessly demanded.

Context matters because Cope’s own poetic persona often trades in clarity, wit, and emotional precision rather than prestige gloom. She’s spent a career proving that lightness can be exacting, that comedy can carry dread, that the “domestic” can be formally sharp. This line sits in that tradition: a feminist critique delivered as an offhand joke, the kind that makes you laugh and then realize the laugh is an admission of how familiar the bias is. It’s not just about women writers; it’s about an industry and a readership that mistake bruises for depth.