International Booker Prize:   Shahrnush Parsipur’s “Women Without Men”

Posted on by
1

“How can they tell people their daughter or sister has turned into a tree?” –  “Women Without Men,” by Shahrnush Parispur

Penguin UK edition

Shahrnush Parsipur’s enchanting novella, “Women Without Men,” translated by Faridoun Farrokh, is longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The style is lyrical and hypnotic, and the book laced with magic realism. I am spellbound by the imagery of the garden.

In this brilliant, original novel, set in the 1950s, five Iranian women resist the bonds of sexist society, and, by luck and magical agency, find themselves in an Edenic orchard. A teacher walks out on her job without giving notice: she plants herself as a tree.  A former prostitute gives birth to a water lily.  A spinster, murdered by her brother and rescued from the grave by a spinster frenemy, helps the gardener gather dew drops.  A wealthy widow, formerly an oppressed housewife, hopes to build a literary movement around the woman-tree.

The Edenic garden heals and renews. The women escape from the dysfunctional city, with its crime and riots. Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a garden?  The magical gardener has only to touch a plant to make it flourish.

I predict this stunning book will win, or at least make the shortlist. It is not technically a new book, but it has an unusual history. The Islamic government banned it when it was published in Iran in 1989 and Parsipur went to prison for it. She now lives in the U.S.

Feminist Press edition, U.S.

Penguin recently published the English translation by Faridoun Farrokh,which was first published in 2011 by the Feminist Press in the U.S.

This book is truly an international venture, with roots in many countries.

THE THORNFIELD HALL NEWSLETTER

Posted on by
4

Volume 3, February 2026

In this winter issue of The Thornfield Hall Newsletter, I muse on Mary Shelley’s Matilda,a novel posthumously published in 1959; the new Wuthering Heights sensation; and the International Booker Prize longlist.

Mary Shelley’s Radical Novel, Matilda

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Mary Shelley’s Matilda is a masterpiece. This brilliant short novel, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, can be read as psychological horror.

It begins with the narrator Matilda’s reunion with her father. She has never met him: after her mother died in childbirth, he deserted her and turned her over to his stern older sister. Now he is entranced by 16-year-old Matilda, who closely resembles her mother. The father and daughter develop an unusually close relationship, and he admits to incestuous love for Matilda.

Their relationship is shattered. Matilda, weeping and tearing her hair like the heroine of a Greek tragedy, rushes to her room. After reading the letter he wrote before leaving, Matilda, fearing he might commit suicide, takes off in a carriage to track him down. The scene resembles the scene in Bleak House, in which Esther and Inspector Bucket try to find Lady Dedlock. I would say that Dickens read Mary Shelley, except Matilda wasn’t published yet.

Matilda is as Gothic as Shelley’s Frankenstein, and shares similar themes.  Just as Dr. Frankenstein’s repulsion and abandonment turn his ugly creature into a monster, Matilda’s father’s confession and flight change her from a joyous girl into a miserable, lonely, faded young woman.

Is her father, as he says, “a monster”?  Or a “fallen Archangel?”  Perhaps he is too forgiving of himself.  After his admission of love for Matilda, he says he’s a “worm,” but soon becomes manic. He teeters from hatred to joy. 

“Yes, yes, I hate you!  You are my bane, my disgust, my poison! Oh, no! …  You are none of all these, you are my light, my only one, my life – My daughter, I love you!”

Matilda begins to believe that she is the monster. She moves to a desolate place in the country where she meets a poet (Percy Bysshe Shelley?), who is also grieving a loss. (This friendship is not romantic.) By the way, Shelley took the name Matilda from the guide in Dante’s Purgatorio. Dante’s Matilda is a Persephone figure who acts as Dante’s guide through the Terrestrial Paradise.

Although Mary Shelley sent the manuscript of Matilda to her father, William Godwin, the philosopher, he was scandalized and refused to sent it to a publisher. He had a complicated relationship with his daughter, and was a reluctant father. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, died two weeks after giving birth to Mary. Godwin married a second time to find someone to do child care. 

Matilda was finally published in 1959.

The Wuthering Heights Hullabaloo

Emily Brontë is my favorite Brontë sister, and I suspect that the new film of Wuthering Heights sells books. There is a new edition of the novel published in Simon & Schuster’s Female Filmmakers Collection, a series of books curated by female filmmakers. Emerald Fennel, the writer and author of the new film of Wuthering Heights, wrote the introduction to this new edition.

It’s Book Award Season Again!

The International Book Prize longlist was announced today.  The nominees are:

Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated from German by Ruth Martin

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, We Are Green and Trembling, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers

Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier, translated from Dutch by David McKay

Mathias Énard, The Deserters, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell

Ia Genberg, Small Comfort, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

Rene Karabash, She Who Remains, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel

Daniel Kehlmann, The Director, translated from German by Ross Benjamin

Ana Paula Maia, On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan

Matteo Melchiorre, The Duke. translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri

Marie Ndiaye, The Witch, translated from French by Jordan Stump

Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh

Olga Ravn, The Wax Child, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Hawthorne’s Commune in “The Blithedale Romance”

Posted on by
Reply

During freshman year at the university, I enrolled in a Women’s Studies class.  I was excited: in high school I’d read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics,  Sisterhood Is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.  I also organized a feminist consciousness group, and circulated a petition to add a homecoming king to the homecoming rituals (this was to point out the sexism of the homecoming queen tradition).  Almost everyone signed it, but the principal vetoed it. 

How is this pertinent to Nathanael Hawthorne, you may ask. It has to do with the way we read him in the Women’s Studies class.  Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance is set in a socialist community, Blithedale Farm.  This fictional community is based on Brook Farm, a socialist community in Massachusetts where  Hawthorne lived for several months.  I’m fascinated by the New England communities of this era. It was the transcendental philosophers’ 1960s.

In The Blithedale Romance, the poet-protagonist, Miles Coverdale, arrives at the farm in a snowstorm.. He asks Zenobia, a feminist and an enchanting raconteur, how the labor will be divided. He and the men will work on the farm, while the women will do housework.  Miles adamantly defends the cause of women: “It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls  to the lot of women is just what chiefly distinguishes artificial life – the life of degenerated mortals – from the life of Paradise.”  But Zenobia, “with mirth gleaming out of her eyes,” says, “We shall have some difficulty in adapting the Paradisical system, for at least a month.” 

In my superb class, we read The Blithedale Romance with a kind of feminist knowingness, because we were familiar with the many collectives and communes that dotted the American landscape.

Because Blithedale Farm is a collective community, not a commune, it is dedicated to radical politics and living according to these beliefs. Collectives are sometimes organized by principles of feminism, socialism, communism, anarchy, and philosophy. These modern collective inhabitants not only shared the housework and child care, but founded free schools, held political rallies, established underground newspapers, had consciousness-raising groups, and gave lectures.

On the other hand, communes in the late 20th century were more hippie-ish and free-wheeling, known for drugs,  STDs, and sharing LSD with their children. (Cf. Joan Didion’s essay ‘”Slouching towards Bethlehem.).

In every family there is one sad case, and in ours – on the wrong side of the family, of course – an aunt left her whole estate, including a trailer for him to live in, to the family waif, clearly to rescue him from a commune where he’d stagnated for more than 20 years. But this aunt left no money at all to her son, which horrified everyone. The heir wanted to institutionalize him, but my dad would not allow it. And, to make sure he didn’t get put away after Dad’s death, Dad left him some money in his will. One hopes that the cunning ex-commune dweller, who has traveled to the Cayman Islands, doesn’t have power-of-attorney.

Here are two other novels about communes.

Drop City, by T. C. Boyle (comic novel about a commune in Alaska)

Kinflicks, by Lisa Alther (in one hilarious chapter the heroine lives in a commune)

Any favorite commune novels?

The Alternative Newspaper Scene

Posted on by
2

The alternative newspaper had two things going for it: (1) it was free, and (2) it had one excellent columnist.  The very sound of the word “alternative” raised my expectations, though I clearly confused it with “underground” newspapers.  Would it be like The Village Voice, with music reviews by Nat Hentoff and humor columns by Cynthia Heimel?

“What it means,” said my friend, the editor of a local magazine, “is that I can cancel my subscription to Marcus’ newsletter and read him for free.”

I had never heard of Marcus, a columnist who lived off his newsletter.  It’s no wonder I never heard of him, since local politics was his thing, and politics bored me.  To me, his stuff read like typical op/ed pieces, but I never read those, either, so I’m no judge.  In retrospect, he was a daring radical who deconstructed the dark powers of the city

Every columnist has his or her fans, but I skipped all “news” columns, such as they were, and stuck to the lighter stuff. My motto is:  Give me fluff!  Give me art! (There’s nothing funnier than local art: sorry, but it’s true!)  Give me movies (comedies, please, and remakes of Jane Austen)!  Give me literary fiction!  It took me all of three minutes to read the the alternative paper.

I especially enjoyed the art column. The whimsical art critic created a gossip column/travel writing gig.  He/she would travel with friends to an art show in a big city, but get distracted by shopping. Once, they got gigs as paparazzi. Well, obviously he exaggerated or made some of it up! But it was great fun to read.

The paper folded, as these things do. Another free paper replaced it. But I still miss The Village Voice. That was the template for underground excellence.

Jean Kerr, American Humorist

Posted on by
Reply
Jean Kerr (1922-2003)

“Who is your favorite humor writer of the 20th century?”  

 Your mind goes blank. Humor? You remember humor. You may, if you’re lucky, blurt out Dorothy Parker and J. S. Perelman.  They were famous, and they wrote for The New Yorker.  

But, honestly, they are not my favorites. I am a great aficionado of women’s humor columns, the kind published in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post in the 20th century.

My favorite is Jean Kerr (1922-2003), a playwright, humorist, and the wife of Walter Kerr the drama critic. She was, and is, one of the wittiest American humor writers.

First, let me say I am a great fan of the film version of Kerr’s play, Mary, Mary.

And I am mad about her humor books.  I recommend How I Got to Be Perfect, a collection of essays, most from her previous books, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, The Snake Has All the Lines, and Penny Candy.

 In the introduction to How to Be Perfect, Kerr reflects wittily on reading and writing.

“As a matter of fact, I will read anything rather than work.  And I don’t mean interesting things like the yellow section …  The truth is that, rather than put a word on paper, I will spend a whole half hour reading the label on a milk of magnesia bottle.”

I was fascinated to learn that she does “about half” of her writing in the car, where there is nothing to read except Chevrolet manuals.

I have tried writing on mass transit, to no avail. I tried to write an essay on a train once, but there was no room to spread out the necessary books. I have, however, read widely on planes. Recommendations: E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View or Gerald Heard’s mystery, A Taste for Honey.

Reading in public is possible, though not without its hair-raising moments.  On a recent bike ride, I carried three books in my panniers, because I might require three reading choices when I sat down to take a break. And then suddenly a woman yelled repeatedly at me, “Stop, stop! There’s an eagle.”  

I am not interested in eagles.  I saw one once.  It was enough.

When I stopped reluctantly, she put her hand firmly on my arm and attempted to pull me off my bike. Something was off: no stranger has ever gripped my arm before – and then there was the undeniable fact that there was no eagle.  I left, despite her repeated orders: “Turn around. Here, here.” I biked away.. Captain Nemo suggested she was after my billfold.  

Anyway, it was a forgettable, if unpleasant, incident. I took refuge in Kerr’s humor columns, as I often do, because nothing is ever too awful in her world. and if it is, she makes fun of it.  

I laughed aloud over “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, I Don’t Want to Hear a Word from You,” in which she wittily recounts her husband’s skepticism about beauty products. 

“He is always trying to explain to me that dermatologists have proven that lard, or even bacon drippings, will do just as much or just as little to lubricate the human skin as any cosmetic invented…. When I consider the dreadful samples of lumbering humor I am subjected to when I apply the merest dab of Formula 22 (“Oh, you’re coming to bed?  With all that grease, I thought you were getting ready to swim the Channel”) I can’t bring myself even to contemplate the low-comedy scenes we’d have if I came to bed covered with bacon fat.”

I’d love to live in Jean Kerr’s world.  She turns disappointments and irritations into funny, charming episodes.  There’s nothing quite comparable to Jean Kerr’s columns today. There’s plenty of humor, but this is a different time.

The Condition of “Mrs. Bridge”

Posted on by
4

The other day, I came across a first edition of Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (1959) in the mud room. “I didn’t know we had this!” I exclaimed.

The ’50s cover art is whimsical: the old-fashioned black phone on a white table, dwarfed by a large pink mass (Mrs. Bridge’s knitting? A hat?), and white gloves and a white scarf tucked beneath the pink. The white paper cut-outs are juxtaposed and contrasted with the black table legs.

“I adored this when I read it, ” I said. Back then I related to Mrs. Bridge, a housewife in Kansas City, who has ups and downs. and becomes less conventional as the year pass. I have nothing in common with Mrs. Bridge, but that’s the wonderful thing about fiction: sometimes we become the characters as we read.

I found a handwritten receipt tucked inside the cover.  I bought the book on Jan. 12, 1991, at an antiquarian bookshop. I suppose it closed long ago.

And the price of the book was $9.

“You got robbed,”   said the captain.   “This isn’t in good condition.”

 I didn’t think about condition when I bought used books back then. 

I wonder what I would think about Mrs. Bridge now.  I reread it some years back in a paperback and was less enthusiastic.  At different stages of life, we read things differently.

But I am inspired by the old-fashioned jacket copy.  This writer says, “Mrs. Bridge is a totally delightful reading experience.  It brings in turn the wry smile, the outright laugh, and shows the pang of a deep and willing sympathy.”

That’s a book I want to read.

Responsibility and Abandonment:  Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

Posted on by
2

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is a timely novel.  In this horror classic, published in 1818, Shelley describes a hubristic scientist’s abandonment of the life-form he assembles from corpses and electricity.  Affectionate and innocent, the new creature is so hideous that Frankenstein himself rejects it.  The lonely monster, who terrifies all humans, becomes a murderer to avenge himself.

There are two ways to approach this, first, as a traditional horror novel (it is that), second as a dark commentary on Darwinism, the Prometheus myth, and the dangers of abstractions.

The theme of loneliness overrides all abstraction, though.  Frankenstein himself is, ironically, blessed with social skills and not lonely.  But Captain Walton, who rescues Frankenstein from a melting iceberg (long story!), is as lonely as Frankenstein’s creature. In fact, Captain Walton has no friends on his ship.

The novel is framed by letters from Captain Walton to his sister.  In an early letter he confides. “I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.”

This letter could be a personals ad, and a perfect dating match for the Creature, who is even lonelier than Walton. The creature does beg Frankenstein to make a mate for him, but Frankenstein refuses, and he has his reasons, but… Was it ethical to refuse and doom him to loneliness?

The creature is at first filled with wonder and longs to make friends, but human beings are terrified of him.  He hides in a shack attached to the cottage of a poor genteel family who love music and books . By watching and listening through a crack in the wall, he learns language and the rudiments of history.  He is inspired by their stories about the Greeks and Romans, and chivalry and Christianity.  He wonders, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?”  Alas, when he reveals himself to the family, they scream and run away. 

The novel is layered with references to philosophy, Shelley was influenced by Clement of Alexandria, a second-century gnostic.  The following quote certainly illuminates her thoughts about the birth of Frankenstein’s Creature.

What liberates is the knowledge of what we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what is rebirth.

Shelley, the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin, was a radical intellectual whose storytelling is interwoven with subtle philosophical observations. Her father, William Godwin, a political philosopher, was eloquent about social-psychological theory. He emphasized the necessity of putting esponsibility before abstractions.

“..Knowledge, and the enlargement of the intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy… and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society.”

This is a great read – I galloped through it – and it raises pertinent questions.

The Past Recaptured: Valerie Perrin’s “Forgotten on Sunday”

Posted on by
4

Valerie Perrin’s charming novel, Forgotten on Sunday, translated from French by Hildegarde Searle, affirms the power of storytelling. The narrator, Justine, a 21-year-old assistant nurse at an old people’s home, loves the residents and is fascinated by their stories.

Justine explains, “For me, it was there that everything began: they told us stories.  And old folks, since they have nothing else to do, tell the past like nobody else.”

Justine grew up in a house without stories.  Orphaned when her parents and aunt and uncle died in a car accident, Justine and her cousin Jules are raised by their grandparents. Gran and Gramps seldom talk to each other and never tell stories. They bury the past.

So when Justine buys a notebook to write down the story of 95-year-old Helene, her favorite patient, she herself begins to feel more connected to her own past.  Eventually, she looks up records of the police investigation of the car accident, which gives her clues about the relationship between her grandparents. 

Helene’s story is central to the novel:  When Helene, who cannot read, meets a handsome young man, Etienne, the son of a blind man, he solves the problem of her dyslexia by teaching her braille.  They are a happy couple until the Germans invade France.  The Nazis drag Etienne away to a concentration camp.  He is tortured and forgets his past. Helene sends letters to hospitals but cannot find him.

Justine is very moved by Helene’s story, and begins to feel emotions for a man she sleeps with, whom she calls What’s-his-Name.   She has always been nonchalant about relationships with men. Now she begins to feel love.

This layered novel, published by Europa, is a page-turner. A commentary on the importance of memories, too.

The Best of Thornfield Hall: The Biblio-Anarchist

Posted on by
Reply

I have decided to begin my Best of Thornfield Hall series by explaining my philosophy of blogging. I enjoy writing about classics and old books, am fascinated by Victorian grammar, and if not for a love of book reviews, would never read anything published after the 20th century.

This post was first published on March 19, 2024.

The Biblio-Anarchist:  Book Blogging in 2024

In 2018, I decided to create a new book blog,  Thornfield Hall. I planned to do  “alternative” writing about books, but sometimes on personal subjects.

Blogging was not always so tranquil as it is at Thornfield Hall. Dear Reader, how was I to know that grammar was a political issue? At my old blog I wrote a piece about the habit of using the third-person plural pronoun, “they,” where the singular pronoun, “he” or “she,” was correct. There was indignation:  I was told about the “singular they.” I had never head of the word non-binary, and had no idea that trans people often prefer to use plural pronoun, “they.”  

This Is What Comes of Not Keeping Up.

The form of the blog, or weblog, dates back to the late ‘90s, when I did not properly have the internet.  My modem took ten minutes to power up – one drank coffee or took a short walk while it struggled and made an eerie buzzing noise  – and it was could not upload pages with too many images. But I enjoyed simple book boards where people discussed books. 

There were many enthusiastic readers online. There were gatherings in New York, California, and the South.  I was impressed with the kindness and intelligence of the online community. I enjoyed having coffee with them in person, shopping for books, and going to readings.

After we got Wifi,  I began to read blogs.  I enjoyed the informal writing more than traditional reviews. 

I tend to read old books and classics. Occasionally I write about new books, but only when I admire them.

Far better to stick to the classics.  Is this biblio-anarchy?  It doesn’t seem radical, but perhaps it is.  I try to limit screen time, too, because I get so many recommendations at blogs and Bookstagram that I become a super-consumer.

That’s why I want to become a biblio-anarchist. I don’t want to destroy anything, but I want to stop my “production-consumer” cycle.

Happy reading!

What Will She Do?  Storm Jameson’s “A Day Off”

Posted on by
2

Moving is an emotional experience. I would have lived in the same apartment forever if the ceiling hadn’t fallen in.

Then we moved into an old, rambling house, which was our modest version of Howards End. Housing issues dominate my favorite novel by E. M. Forster. The heroine, Margaret Schlegel, must find a house for her family when their lease runs out, and though she looks at many houses, she can’t find affordable housing in London. The controversial solution might be Howards End, a house impulsively left to Margaret by a woman she had met only a few times.

In Storm James’ novella, A Day off, published in a single volume or a Virago collection of novellas, Women against Men, there is also a couple called the Schlegels. The unnamed heroine worked as a maid at a hotel when she was young, and remembers Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel, a kind couple who rented a room.   In the morning another employee discovers that the Schlegels have committed suicide.  The heroine is so overcome with grief that she leaves her job. 

The Schlegels’ death is significant, not only because it shocks the heroine, but because suicide would be one of her options in her late forties, except that, fortunately, her vitality is too strong. : But like Forster’s Schlegels, she worries about losing her home, a shabby rented room where she has lived for a number of years. George, the man who supports her (she is his mistress), hasn’t written or sent her a check in five weeks.   Well, she puts a good face on it – an aging face – and she wills herself to believe the letter will arrive today.

“A Day Off” is included in this collection of novellas.

Jameson’s prose is hard and unsentimental. This is not Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day or The Provincial Lady in London. The heroine is a lower-class version of Jean Rhys’s heroines, sad women who don’t know how they’ll survive without men.   Rhys and Jameson were both writing in the 1930s, but their styles are very different:  Rhys’s prose is spare and sad, and her lost women have no one to turn to.  Jameson’s style is vigorous and alert: she sees alternatives for her characters. The heroine of A Day Off may be going down – but not yet. 

She decides to forget about George for a few hours and take a day off at Hampstead Heath. She enjoys the scenery, the deer and the wild flowers, and takes a long, much needed nap. But hers is not the sleep of youth; she drools and has lines of her face.  A group of young people laugh at her, and when she wakes up, she scolds them, mostly because she realizes she isn’t young anymore. 

She decides to spend the rest of her money on a meal.  Her feet hurt, and she has blisters, but she walks slowly, painfully downhill to a tearoom she remembers.  She sits at a table with a lonely older woman who shares her pastry and confides that she is splurging because she had a windfall of eight pounds.  And then, alas, we see the ugly side of our heroine:  she steals the purse while the woman is in the restroom.

Desperation has driven her, but she also is jumpy and afraid of her action.  We despair for her.  And then she commits another desperate act. But the heroine is resilient. Perhaps she’ll get back on her feet. Perhaps she’ll go into retail: she met George while she worked in a shop that sold gloves. We hope for the best. We know that whatever job she takes, her feet will be killing her! But it’s sad that George, or his successor, will never marry her.