All of these women, in whatever their own circumstances, are unhappy and bitter and although there are moments of relief and redemption, each of them are more than willing to throw one another under the (metaphorical) bus when suits.

It’s a wry, smart, darkly funny book, and there are occasional glimpses of an early 70s hipsterism in the style that I sometimes found grating. Respectable wife, unmarried mother, divorcee, femme fatale - these are roles that society demands from Scarlet, Jocelyn, Helen, Susan and Audrey. The part that was the most interesting to me was how cruel the women could be (especially to each other) when they were unhappy and bitter because of it. Hovering about are Scarlet's friends and protegÈes, all of whom exist only in relation to the men whose beds they grace, covet or leave. Gradually the plot moves away from Scarlet and through these lives and others, spiralling outwards until certain parallels emerge between all these lives: the sense of male-female relationships as a series of inevitable and painful compromises, both romantic and financial, and the ever-present twin threats of violence and poverty which keep women in their place.This book, or any of her books, may not be agreeable to the palate of younger women, but for my generation who slogged through feminism in the 60's and 70's with little progress in some areas (equal pay for equal work for example) and have seen much of what we fought for overturned these days: the frustration with the male species and their need to dominate will ring true. I think perhaps because at this time of my life, this sentence completely resonated: "There is nothing more glorious than to be a young girl, and there is nothing worse than to have been one. That because the novel presents itself as an ironic portrait of English society in the 1950s, with a focus on the women; it deceives you, making you land lightly at the tragedies that await these women who (when you realise it, it's heartbreaking) are not even for a moment the real owners of their lives.

There’s Audrey, a working-class girl who changes her name and takes up a new life with a man dedicated to a middle-class parody of destitution on a bleak (but wholly organic) farm in the countryside.Rebelling against the 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘰 that gives them the role not so much of the 'weaker sex', as of the 'accessory sex', functional to the male one, seems inevitable in the course of the story- yet, not all of them have a happy ending after trying. These women can only try to survive; and then, look with hope at the new generations, raised differently from how their mothers had raised them, destined to break with many of the patterns that had stifled them - once they all land in the tumultuous 1960s. The first people (women) we are introduced to are Wanda, aged sixty-four, and her daughter, Scarlet. THIS IS A BOOK I READ MANY YEARS AGO AND WAS DELIGHTED TO SEE THAT I HAD THE OPTION TO PURCHASE IT VIA MY KINDLE. Once I started it, I was already halfway through the book; then, all of a sudden, I felt the need to slow down and absorb the events of the young female protagonists.

The novel follows a group of 'friends' as they grow into women, amidst the patriarchal structure of post-war British society. Follow Wanda, the tough 1930s radical, her daughter Scarlet, unmarried, pregnant and frightened, and Scarlet's friends -- born victims, snobs, obsessive lovers -- in their absurd, nightmarish, often hilariously awful liaisons. Fortunately that wasn’t the case because I couldn’t keep my grubby little fingers away from this book.Questo perché il romanzo si presenta come un ritratto ironico della società inglese degli anni '50 del secolo scorso, con focus sul genere femminile; ti inganna, facendoti approdare a cuor leggero alle tragedie che attendono queste donne che (quando lo realizzi, è straziante) non sono neanche per un attimo le reali proprietarie delle loro vite. Yet here we all are by accident of birth, sprouted breasts and bellies, as cyclical of nature as our timekeeper the moon - and down here among the women we have no option but to stay.

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Weldon paints a truer and harsher image of friendship, womanhood and the flaws of the feminine ideal in this novel than what we expect from novels depicting this period (at least I did).First American edition printed in United States (there was a previous American edition printed in Britain).