“Until very recently,” wrote Hilary Mantel in 2016, “there was a category of books ‘by women, for women’. . . . [that] included works written with great skill but in a minor key, novels that dealt with private, not public, life. . . . Understated, neat, they do not employ what Walter Scott called ‘the Big Bow-wow strain’. . . . Though authors such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield opened up a new way of witnessing the world, good books by women still fell out of print and vanished into obscurity. . . . In the 1980s, feminist publishing put them back on the shelves.”
This course will comprise four such fine but under-read books, tucked chronologically between the experimental period of Woolf and Mansfield and the feminist period of Fay Weldon, Erica Jong, and company (although championed by them). Written by women born in Ireland, England, and Scotland, they are The Country Girls (1960), by Edna O’Brien; In a Summer Season (1961), by Elizabeth Taylor; A Severed Head (1961), by Iris Murdoch; and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), by Muriel Spark. Although composed in the unflashy style described by Mantel, these books reflect the changing sexual mores of the post-war period with psychological complexity. All of the books are available from Mainecat or in paperback from online used booksellers. They average about 200 pages each.
Instructor Charisse Gendron has taught literature, film, and creative writing at Vermont Community College, the University of Connecticut, Middle Tennessee State University, OLLI, Midcoast Senior College, and Coastal Senior College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Third Wednesday, The RavensPerch, Clepsydra, and Blood & Bourbon.