Down Among the Women

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Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Eighteen-year-old unmarried mother Scarlet, a lost child recovering from her first abortion, looks at the world with her friends and begins to see the truth. So begins Fay Weldon’s novel, opening onto 1950s London, where Wanda, a former radical who has left her husband, has raised her daughter Scarlet to be as tough and independent as she is. The novels Down Among the Women (1971), Female Friends (1974), and Remember Me (1976) focus on various women’s reactions to male-and-female relationships. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The gaudy cover of this particular edition doesn’t do the contents justice in this regard: the pink crepe background and the cheeky snapshots of 50s cliches seem rather lightweight in comparison to the scenes of destruction that lie within. Scarlet is pregnant, and has become something of an object of scorn to Wanda, who is resentful of the position she occupies in the life of her ex-husband, Kim, and his new (much younger, also pregnant) wife Susan.Already we have a fairly complex picture emerging, but this is before we have even introduced the other characters in this multi-faceted book. But things do not slot neatly into pigeon holes, and as the women negotiate around the events in their lives, they discover their real selves.

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.There’s Helen, who begins as a model working with artists known only as X and Y; an affair with X soon turns into a far more complicated sort of menage a trois. Fay Weldon CBE was an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. 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.

Respectable wife, unmarried mother, divorcee, femme fatale - these are roles that society demands from Scarlet, Jocelyn, Helen, Susan and Audrey. Fogli ben conservati, saldi e privi di sgualciture da lettura, tonalità ossidate vintage, tagli bruniti dalla luce.Ribellarsi allo 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘰 che dona loro il ruolo non tanto di sesso debole, quanto di sesso accessorio, funzionale a quello maschile, sembra loro inevitabile, nel corso della vicenda; eppure, non per tutte vi è un lieto fine a seguito di ciò. Brossura paperbacks con copertina morbida plastificata, segnata da appesantimento dei toni, leggermente ripiegate le punte, buono lo stato generale.