Her friends are no happier: Sylvia, a born victim; respectable Jocelyn, hopelessly trapped in her dull, bourgeois existence; Audrey, who finally breaks out of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant, and doomed. ONCE AGIN I AM SITTING AND LAUGHING AT THE ANTICS OF WOMEN WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER -NEEDLESS TO SAY THIS IS A GREAT READ. with heavy handed metaphor on every page Weldon also begins to develop her unique turn of phrase and is bitter, pessimistic, true. Fortunately that wasn’t the case because I couldn’t keep my grubby little fingers away from this book.

All of them tried to follow some sort of feminine ideal and great unhappiness resulted from squelching their own desires.

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the clinging helplessness of her father's new wife Susan, her junior, whose submissiveness is the kind that enslaves the man, not the wife. 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.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. This is one of those books which at first seems doubly dated: the story is set in the 1950s, but it was published in the early 1970s, and in many ways it wears openly more signs of those later times than it does the former. Questo romanzo ha segnato l'inizio di quella che so che sarà una lunga conoscenza tra me e Fay Weldon, la sua autrice. Edwin wants to have custody of Byzantia and to change her name; he doesn’t want any name in particular, he just hates the name Byzantia.

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.She moved to TV drama (writing the pilot episode of the iconic series Upstairs Downstairs ) then turned to novels - including the classic The Life and Loves of a She Devil and the Booker-shortlisted Praxis .

To sum up, I found this to be an entertaining, very readable book in Waldon’s usual facetious style; I couldn’t remember who everybody was, but it didn’t matter.

Jag hade förväntat mig mer humor, men istället är det en ganska sorglig historia om kvinnoöden som berättas. The first people (women) we are introduced to are Wanda, aged sixty-four, and her daughter, Scarlet. 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. 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). Samtliga påverkade av ett samhälle där kvinnans roll var starkt begränsad och förväntningarna var tydliga.