So what do modern women want?

Everyone wants the answer to that question - from men to marketing companies, there are plenty of people who would pay big money for the answer. I don't have it but this summer I've been reading through a whole bunch of feminist, modern-womens books in the hope of finding the answer to this and other equally important questions. And I think there's a book I will need to have for my journey, a guide books of sorts. Namely "The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City" by Imelda Whelehan. 

This is what it says on amazon.co.uk: 
Imelda Whelehan provides an overview of popular women's writing from the late 1960s to the present, looking at how key feminist texts such asThe Women's Room, Kinflicks and Fear of Flying have influenced popular contemporary fiction such as Bridget Jones' Diary and Sex and the City. Whelehan reconsiders the links between the politics of feminist thought, action and writing and creative writing over the past 30 years and suggests that even so-called 'post feminist' writing owes an enormous debt to feminism's second wave.

Have you read it and can you recommend it? 

Fear of Flying, Fondness of F......

Did my headline seem like a bit much? If so, I'm sorry. Well, not really. If I'm being totally honest, it sums up "Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong rather nicely, I think.


This is not the kind of sex that you find in "50 Shades of Whatever" and its counter-parts. It's dirty, yes, but mostly because the people taking part in the sexual acts haven't had a shower in days... The sex in "Fear of Flying" is more real, not stylized in any way and way cooler than a lot of the drivel in the market at the moment. 


Isadora Wing is a 29-year old divorced and remarried author. Having married and divorced her clinically insane college boyfriend, she is now married to psychoanalyst Bennett and together they are attending a psychoanalysts' conference in Vienna. What better setting for a comedic drama than a room full of psychoanalysts all peddling their individual interpretation of Freud and Jung? While in Vienna, Isadora falls in lust with the psychoanalyst (yes there are a lot of them in this book, somewhere close to 120) Adrian Goodlove who appears to Isadora to be able to supply her with something that she has always wanted: the zipless fuck. As in an anonymous, non-commital, passionate roll in the hay. 
This is a love triangle unlike any I've come across in a novel before, especially as it is terribly short on love, and it causes Isadora to think back and consider her history with men in particular and with her own sense of self in general. 


As a main character, Isadora is interesting because she's bloody annoying. She is indecisive and does not know her own mind. She's frustrated with her sisters for looking down on her for not having children, yet condescends their life decisions. She is passive when she should be proactive, then stumbles mindlessly into trouble when she should be considering the best line of action. Yet somehow, she is also likeable, probably because she puts herself through an awful lot in the hope that things will end up right. Some will be appalled by what has been deemed her promiscuity but sex for Isadora is about more than the physical act, for her it seems to be a tool used to explore her own identify. She is on a journey of self-discovery and her fear of flying is not only literal but also a symbol of her fear of searching for herself and for her own identity instead of searching for a man whose identity she can mould herself on.   


It could all get a bit stuffy (especially as so many psychoanalysts are involved) but actually it is a really funny book, particularly the parts involved Isadora's sisters who really are quite a bunch. When it comes to dumb remarks and stupid decisions, they are up there with the Bennett sisters from "Pride and Prejudice". 


This is the thinking young woman's book. If you are a 18 to 20-year-old considering whether to spend your money on 50 Shades, please pick up "Fear of Flying" instead. It'll give you much more to think about and to consider, about yourself and your generation, about your mother's generation, about men and about sex.


Read it if: You're a woman between the ages of 18 and 60 with a sense of humour and an appetite for passion. 

Women in a Time of Change

A while back I read "The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe and my review was pretty raving: I loved it! So when I heard that others who like "The Best of Everything", also liked Mary McCarthy's "The Group", there was no way around it. I had to have it. Last week, when my boyfriend and I went on vacation, I started reading "The Group" on the train to Gatwick airport and pretty much from the first page, I was hooked. 


"The Group" is a eight young women, all graduates of Vassar, who become close friends during their college years. The novel follows them as they leave their college days behind to pursue love, careers and plans for the future. As characters, they are very different and the focus of the novel shifts from one girl to the next so that we get to understand their individual stories one at a time while glimpsing the all of them in each others stories. It is a genius way to to tell the story of this group of girls and it kept me reading furiously, as I tried to understand how their lives interwove and how their actions impacted each other. 


What becomes very clear from the stories of these girls is, that they are living in time of change. World War I, the depression, the changing roles of women, of marriage, of sex. These are a generation of women who have to find their own way in life because the world has changed tremendously since their mothers were young. They are all keen to make a difference, to do something meaningful with their lives in a world where nothing is as it once was. As a historical novel, it works beautifully. 


For me, however, the history aspects were an advantage but not the main advantage. I found that one of the best things about "The Group" is that there are no clear goodies or baddies emerging from the stories, each of us readers will root for a different girl and who we root for might change. Personally, I found the bohemian "women who loves too much" Kay slightly exasperating and Priss made me want to shake some sense into her. However, I suspect that many others will see Kay as a hero because of her fierce pursuit of her ambition to "do good" in New York. 


My favourites changed a bit as I read but at the end of the book, I was found that three girls had made most impression on made and had come closest to my heart: 


Dottie for her robbed innocence and her steely character as she realizes that sometimes the happy ending will look different to what we imagined. 


Polly for her maturity and her insistence that what counts is that she is happy - not other peoples perception of her or her circumstances in life. 


And last but not least the beautiful and fascinating Lakey who is understood to live a charmed existence in glamorous Europe but who turns out to be the girl who may have most to fight for. 


Read it if: You like "The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe, "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann. You wouldn't mind going back in time and visiting 1930s New York. 

Review: "Cassandra at the Wedding" by Dorothy Baker

Take one motherless, disillusioned, obsessive, neurotic grad student battling to finish her thesis and trying to come to term with her twin sister's wedding. Add a swimmingpool, a stiff drink, a wedding dress disaster and a whole lot of unspoken tension. Recipe for disaster? So I should think.

Cassandra is going home to her childhood home to celebrate the wedding of her twin sister Judith to a young doctor. It is a joyous occasion for everyone - apart from Cassandra. For her it is a horror story. She and Judith used to do everything together but when Judith met her fiancee what was supposed to be the future was suddenly the past. The possibility that one of them might end up getting married and setting up home with someone else has never crossed Cassandra's mind and when the reader meets her, she is in a state of shock. As the book progresses, Cassandra seems to get more and more erratic and angry, her actions becoming increasingly selfish and destructive at the same time.

"Cassandra at the Wedding" by Dorothy Baker is a classic. It is at the same time funny, heartbreaking, sad, tender and beautiful. Cassandra's difficulty coping with her sister's marriage becomes more and more encompassing until it obliterates her sense of perspective completely. What is so impressive is that even though Cassandra behaves like a selfish, spoiled brat towards her family, her sister, her sister's fiancee, it is impossible not to like her and not to empathize with her.
Dorothy Baker has given her such a strong voice that the reader will not fail to see the story from Cassandra's angle. Even when she is horrible, I still felt for her and that is the strength of this book.

The story itself and Cassandra herself is actually pretty sad. She is so miserable, so unable to find her place in life, yet it is told with a certain cheerfulness. The juxtaposition enhances the misery yet highlights that for everyone around Cassandra, for her immediate family, this is a time for celebration, while for her it is more like a funeral than a wedding and her mourning are a pair of glasses that colours how she sees all the events around her.

At the same time, Cassandra and Judith can be seen as representing a very exciting historical period in American history. Judith follows a traditional pattern, getting married, laying her ambitions aside to devote herself to her husband and let their life be dictated by his career. Cassandra is the modern woman who finds this incredibly difficult to accept and who instead follows her ambitions and her heart. She has no interest in men and actually behaves quite masculine herself at times but she feels out of place and cannot find her way.

Read it if: You like to be challenged by a clever story with realistic and not necessarily likeable characters. If you like a 1960s vibe and reflections on the changing roles of women.

Review: "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" by Florence King

One of the strongest American stereotypes most be the Southern Belle. If you have ever read "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell, you know exactly what I mean. It is a way of life, an identity oozing overpowering feminine charm and delicately wrapped female vile. It is the exact opposite as being one of the boys.


"Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" is Florence King's tale of growing up in a Southern family, ruled by the soft and well-manicured yet steely hand of her grandmother. Granny has aspirations to be a grand lady and she dreams of raising a Southern belle - however, her own daughter is more of a man than a woman really, loving baseball and suits, so when a granddaughter comes into the world, Granny does everything in her power to turn her into a real lady. Growing up in a bohemian household with Granny, mama and a book-loving Englishman for a father means that Florence has a childhood far away from the norm. From day one the three main adults in her life has three very different agendas and Florence has to find her own identity from a young age.


I read about "Confessions..." at one of the blogs I follow and loved the sound of it. I wasn't really sure what to expect but from the first line of the first page, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Florence King has a talent for observing the awkward and funny, the little humorous gems of an extraordinary life. Her observations on the American female of the 1950s are both disturbing and hilarious - I was appalled and fascinated at the fact that all of the other girls in her sorority at college took a marriage prep class. Homework involved washing their boyfriends socks!


To describe these girls who are forever worrying that no-one will marry them and depend on guys to give them self-esteem and self-worth, Florence and her father comes up with the word "malkin". A fantastic word that I will definitely keep in my vocabulary. Is is bound to come in handy.
Florence herself was far from a malkin - though she looked like the perfect young Southern lady, inside her there was a real academic mind hungering for books as well as a sexual creature hungering for, well, sex. The story follows her battles to study French (she ends up studying history instead) and to lose her virginity without falling pregnant. Quite rebellious pursuits in the South in the 1950s but Florence has courage and is not afraid to go after the things in life as she wants.


The book is written with intelligence and personality, it is full of anecdotes and scattered words of wisdom and it poses questions about femininity and the role of a woman that are as relevant as they were in the 1950s. Because what defines you as a lady? They way you look or sound? A ring on your finger or who you sleep with? It is probably a question that each of us have to answer for ourself just as Florence King did. And as she herself says in the book - she may have gone to bed with both men and women but she never ever smoked on the street.

Review: "Female Chauvinist Pig" - Miss Piggy

No doubt you have seen them, the ladettes, the chav girls - if not in real life, then at least the pictures. They are the girls that give the rest of us a bad name as they stagger around the centre of the city, drunk and clad in the smallest garments possible with too much make-up and to little dignity. They are the women who want to be one of the men and there is nothing wrong with that but in the process they seem to lose their dignity.

These are some of the girls that Ariel Levy write about in her brilliant and entertaining book "Female Chauvinist Pig: The Rise of Raunch". "Female Chauvinist Pig" is a short but very well put together book about the tendency of some women to want to be one of the men. It features chapters about Playboy and Hugh Hefner, about Girls Gone Wild (never heard of it before but what a nasty concept), Paris Hilton, CAKE parties and many many more phenomenons that seem to have sprung out of the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s.

Levy wants to confront the raunch culture and questions if it really is - as many of its participants say - a part of the liberation of women. Levy seems to think not, she finds it degrading and chauvinist - and she somewhat berates us women for misusing the privileges our mothers won for us.

Personally I found this book a bit too judgmental. I consider myself one of the boys but I don't think I am part of a raunch culture and I would never dress like Paris Hilton on a night out. Ever. However, I liked the book because it introduced me to new concepts and phenomenons and made me think about feminism and ask myself questions. A really great book and one that would make a great present for any girl or woman in the ages 17 to 35.

Review: "Lady Audley's Secret" - The Villainess

Again this is one of those books that have been talked rather a lot about in the blogosphere. It was written by Mary Elisabeth Braddon in 1862 and it caused a bit of a stir when it came out because of its different main character - the infamous Lady Audley.

Lady Audley, formerly the governess Lucy Graham, is a doll-like creature with a mass of blonde curls who is seemingly mild, calm and naive. A bit childish many people observe. Her husband, Lord Audley, is in love and as you know love makes blind and he sees none of her faults. All he sees is the perfect woman, the woman who has awoken a feeling of love in him that he has never experienced before. Sir Audley's nephew, the male main character, Robert Audley, is at first taken with his aunt. The beautiful woman makes him as blind to her duplicity as Lord Audley that is until Robert Audley brings his friend George Talboys to visit Audley Court.
Lady Audley seems to disappear whenever Talboys is visiting and then one day George Talboys disappears leaving Robert Audley depressed and sad. The former indolent, lazy lawyer finds a purpose for his existence - he has to discover what has happened to George Talboys. Soon he realises that Lady Audley is not what she appears to be and that she has something to do with the Talboys affair. More ingredients are murder, arson and of course love...

What I liked most about this book is the fact that the men are all rather weak. Not too clever, lazy, indolent. In the end Robert Audley does rise to the occasion but in general it is the women in this tale who are the strongest, the cleverest. They are the ones that take decisions, acts coolly and carry the plot. Especially (of course) Lady Audley but also Clara Talboys and Robert Audley's cousin, a young lady with lots of energy.

I was not bowled over by this novel. I liked it but I have to admit that the plot was a bit too easy to figure out and since the mystery part by far outweighs the love part, I would have liked a bit more mystery... A lovely read though. I loved the strong women, as always and the language is beautiful, full of great descriptions.

"The Flight from the Enchanter" - a flight of fancy

I have become really quite enchanted with Iris Murdoch and yesterday I finished her slim novel "The Flight from the Enchanter" from 1956. It is a story that revolves around Mischa Fox, the enchanter, a secretive figure who has strange relations to all the other character in the story.

It all starts out with Annette Cockeyne, a young wild-at-heart girl, deciding to leave her finishing school,indulging in a last swing from the chandelier before embarking on a session in the school of life. She stays with her mothers friend Rosa Keepe, a gentlewoman working in a factory who has a complicated relationship to two Polish brothers and a motherly role to her brother Hunter. Other people in the story are the useless John Rainborough, the sneaky Calvin Blick, the seamstress Nina and the eccentric possibly very rich Camilla Wingfield.

The central characters - at least in my interpretation - are Rosa and Anette. They are both women who shrug of the expectations of conventional society. Rosa by working in a factory and having a secretive and difficult relationship to two Polish refugees who have gained a certain power over her. Annette by leaving her finishing school and trying to learning about life on her own - getting into quite an amount of scrapes in the process. Annette made me feel protective of her, she is so unable to cope on her own and her shallow thoughts lead to pretty bad decisions. She is like a child playing grown-up, whereas Rosa has left all of her childhood behind immersing herself in grim reality. And somehow losing herself in the process. It is somehow a disturbing read but also really enchanting. Mischa - the man of impossible power - is enchanting. He seems charismatic and actually nice - however, his right-hand-man Calvin Blick is really creepy, a nasty piece of work.

It is a magical story. The language, the prose, the style of Iris Murdoch is enchanting. I really loved reading the story and found myself really liking Rosa Keepe and her early-feminist ways. A little gem of a book.