During a hot, humid, quasi-tropical summer, when three fans spun in our apartment, and it was too hot to go outside, I drank iced tea and contemplated my collection of paperbacks. Then I decided whimsically to arrange them by cover and publisher.

We won’t talk about Penguins. We all know about them. But one of the best series of the ’80s was the Plume American Women Writers series. I still have a tattered copy of Nancy Hale’s racy best-seller, The Prodigal Women (1944), in which Leda March, a New England intellectual, and Betsy and Maizie Jekyll, two sisters from the South, grow apart as adults and lose touch with one another. But it is their experiences as women as well as their friendship that fascinate us: there is a botched abortion, psychological abuse, adultery, madness, and divorce. This is an extremely long novel, weighing in at 556 pages with small print, but it’s worth it. For fans of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Mary Gordon’s early work.

The Plume American Women series also published Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife (1928), which enjoyed a revival last year, and thus may be better known than Hale’s work today. I was not nearly as keen on this.

Have you heard of the Perrennial Library paperbacks?  Of course you haven’t!  I came across my copy of Ursula Perrin’s novel,  Old Devotions, reissued as a Perrennial Library paperback in 1988. 

I am currently rereading Old Devotions and loving it.  Is Perrin the Phiiip Roth of women’s novels, with a dash of Mary McCarthy mixed with Barbara Pym? The divorced narrator, Isabel, muses sardonically on New York City and the suburbs: her voice is tart, but not unkind. Beneath the tough surface, Isabel, a novelist who works in TV and has given up on men, is a softie. When she reconnects with her old college roommate, Morgan, who is dying of leukemia, she becomes absorbed in suburban life during a stay to help out with the family

I don’t know what will happen, but i suspect it will be complicated. And I am apprehensive for Morgan: she’s caught in a tangled web. Surely she’s not going to fall for the headmaster husband? God forbid!

Eventually I’ll get back to more modern series. Do you have any favorite series that no one else knows about?