Respectable wife, unmarried mother, divorcee, femme fatale - these are roles that society demands from Scarlet, Jocelyn, Helen, Susan and Audrey. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. So begins Fay Weldon’s novel, opening onto 1950s London, where Wanda, a former radical who has left her husband, has raised her daughter Scarlet to be as tough and independent as she is.

This book, or any of her books, may not be agreeable to the palate of younger women, but for my generation who slogged through feminism in the 60's and 70's with little progress in some areas (equal pay for equal work for example) and have seen much of what we fought for overturned these days: the frustration with the male species and their need to dominate will ring true. There’s Audrey, a working-class girl who changes her name and takes up a new life with a man dedicated to a middle-class parody of destitution on a bleak (but wholly organic) farm in the countryside. They are at least reading copies, complete and in reasonable condition, but usually secondhand; frequently they are superior examples. Rebelling against the 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘰 that gives them the role not so much of the 'weaker sex', as of the 'accessory sex', functional to the male one, seems inevitable in the course of the story- yet, not all of them have a happy ending after trying. 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.

Already we have a fairly complex picture emerging, but this is before we have even introduced the other characters in this multi-faceted book. La rottura di catene come quelle imposte dalla disparità di genere è un processo lungo più di una vita. The tension between mother and daughter is political as well as generational; the former is a tough pragmatist, worn hard by the work of the Second World War, with a bleak and cynical outlook of gender relations.

There’s Helen, who begins as a model working with artists known only as X and Y; an affair with X soon turns into a far more complicated sort of menage a trois. The first people (women) we are introduced to are Wanda, aged sixty-four, and her daughter, Scarlet. the clinging helplessness of her father's new wife Susan, her junior, whose submissiveness is the kind that enslaves the man, not the wife.Over the course of twenty years, they will discover it’s never too late to become the women they are meant to be. Una volta iniziato, ero già a metà libro; poi, d'un tratto, ho sentito il bisogno di rallentare e assorbire le vicende delle giovani donne protagoniste. Scarlet is pregnant, and has become something of an object of scorn to Wanda, who is resentful of the position she occupies in the life of her ex-husband, Kim, and his new (much younger, also pregnant) wife Susan. Ribellarsi allo 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘰 che dona loro il ruolo non tanto di sesso debole, quanto di sesso accessorio, funzionale a quello maschile, sembra loro inevitabile, nel corso della vicenda; eppure, non per tutte vi è un lieto fine a seguito di ciò. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.