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Elaine Dundy - The Dud Avocado

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First published in 1958, this tells the fun adventures of a young American women in Paris.  Sally Jay Gorce is our heroine, and she behaves as you might expect a rebellious woman associating with bohemian types to behave. This novel is pretty relatable, and I have to admit I did not see the plot conclusion coming!  There are some nice lines I noticed: A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.  ..... I was still wearing the evening dress I had on when I met Larry that morning and the funny thing about it  was that, even thought twelve hours had elapsed since then, it still wasn't particualry appropriate, I mean I really felt I could expect it to be correct attire at some point of the day - like a watch that has stopped, eventually just happening to have its hands pointing to the right time. I can't understand it. I have quite a lot of clothes and go to quite a lot of places. I never actually seem to be w
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Shere Hite - The Hite Report

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There is a recent documentary about Shere Hite, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who wants her to be remembered. I've been trying to access it but it isn't available in Australia yet.  Journalist, Suzanne Moore, has written about the documentary here .  Shere Hite's book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, was published in 1976. It reports the results of surveying over 3000 women  between the ages of 14 and 78  about their sexual experiences and desires. I read it in the mid 1980s. I recall the boy who lent me his copy - a nerdy young man who I worked with on the Census. It was a six month contract doing the coding and data entry of the national census and threw together a large range of people who were happy to work a six month contract doing boring work. Most of us listened to tapes on our Walkmans as we worked. There were punks saving for a new guitar amp, stay at home mums returning to the workplace, retired older people who just wanted to
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Dorothy B. Hughes - In a Lonely Place

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A crime story in the hard-boiled detective / film noir style set in LA and published in 1947. I'm not giving anything away when I tell you the criminal is the narrator and we, as readers, are in his head. Dix Steele, at a loose end in LA, connects with an old war buddy who is now a police detective on the case of finding a serial killer. As a reader I was intrigued by his psychology, and, to be honest I didn't catch on about some clues as early as I should have. I knew he had to be caught (it's morally right) but I had no idea how. Also, he's kind of charming and cool, and we don't see the details of his crimes, so we can accept him as the people around him accept him. And there's the rub! The women around him are suspicious though, so there's some consolation in that.  I quite liked this: 'Lochner was the tall, thin man. His clothes were a little too big for him, as if he'd loss weight worrying.'  I was quite shocked by the casual cruelty of thi
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Rebecca West - The Return of the Soldier

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This short novel (140 pages) was a surprise and a delight. Published in 1918, it is a like a equivalent to the WWI poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon but from a woman's perspective. The setting is a country house in England, and the story is told by the cousin of the soldier who lives there with the wife of the soldier. The soldier, Christopher, has suffered shell shock and has lost his memory of the past fifteen years, and believes he loves a woman his wife does not know, a woman who is regarded as low class. It incorporates ideas about class, psychology, loss, ethical dilemmas and how people reveal themselves in a crisis. And, of course, the impact of war. Rebecca West was also a journalist, literary critic and essayist. Her acclaimed non-ficton works include 'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia' (1941), which combines travel writing, history, political and cultural analysis, and 'A Train of Powder' (1955) about Britain's foreign
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Irmgard Keun - After Midnight

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First published in Germany in 1937, this short novel tells the story from the point of view of nineteen year old Sanna about her family and friends as Germany is changing. It shows how the political changes impact social changes. The central theme is romance but it is really about how individuals navigate the new rules as the power of the Nazis grows. It is now published as a Penguin Modern Classic, translated by Anthea Bell.  The young women are hanging out in bars more than you might expect for the time period. I like the female references and the humour.  Some extracts: Gerti is washing her swollen eyes. We must go back to our table. My head's full of confused, random thoughts, like a ball of wool I must knit into words. I must knit a stocking of words. It takes so long, and I forget what I was going to say a minute ago, as if I'd dropped a stitch.  ..... Herr Breitwehr believed Frau Silias's story about the fake silver fox fur. So then Frau Breitwehr went off to Godenhe
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Cox, F., & Theodorakopoulos, E. (Eds.). (2019). Homer's Daughters: Women's Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Oxford University Press.

  Cox, F., & Theodorakopoulos, E. (Eds.). (2019). Homer's Daughters: Women's Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond . Oxford University Press. This collection of essays examines how women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, form various background and locales, have responded to, reimagined, and rewritten the Homeric epics. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify to the growing appeal of Homeric texts, and their lasting influence. The treatments addressed range from surrealism to successive waves of feminism to cimaginative explorations of the future, examining Homer’s influence in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring diverse critical approaches to the work. Authors include: H.D., Elizabeth Cook , Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald , Adèle Geras , and Kate Tempest. It ends with Emily Wilson on her n
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Andromache Karanika - Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece.

  Karanika, A. (2014). Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece. Johns Hopkins University Press. Andromache Karanika's Voices at Work explores the intricate connections between ancient Greek poetry, the female poetic voice, and women's labour practices. The poetic voice is intricately intertwined to domestic chores and agricultural labour, such as weaving and storytelling. Karanika identifies female poetic expression and performance in ancient Greek poetry, revealing case studies like Calypso and Circe's weaving and Odyssey 6's washing scene. By revealing the words of women who informed the oral tradition, Karanika gives a voice to silence and sheds light on the complex relationships between ancient Greek poetry and women's labour. Karanika's research expands on Lardinois and McClure's Making Silence Speak (2001), while introducing a theoretical framework to a historical and anthropological approach. She underscores the significance
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