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A Short History of Women: A Novel
Kate Walbert
Scribner
June 2009
On Sale: June 16, 2009
256 pages
ISBN: 1416594981
EAN: 9781416594987
Hardcover
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Fiction
National Book Award finalist Kate Walbert's A Short History
of Women is a profoundly moving portrayal of the
complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, chronicling
five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth
century through the early years of the twenty-first.
The novel opens in England in 1914 at the deathbed of
Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the
cause. Her choice echoes in the stories of her descendants
interwoven throughout: a brilliant daughter who tries to
escape the burden of her mother's infamy by immigrating to
America just after World War I to begin a career in
science; a niece who chooses a conventional path --
marriage, children, suburban domesticity -- only to find
herself disillusioned with her husband of fifty years and
engaged in heartbreaking and futile antiwar protests; a
great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating
anxiety of the times while getting drunk on a children's
playdate in post-9/11 Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of
voices and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit,
Walbert portrays the ways in which successive generations
of women have responded to what the Victorians called "The
Woman Question." As she did in her critically acclaimed The Gardens of Kyoto
and Our Kind, Walbert induces "a state in which the past
seems to hang effortlessly amid the present" (The New York
Times). A Short History of Women is her most ambitious
novel, a thought-provoking and vividly original narrative
that crisscrosses a century to reflect the tides of time
and the ways in which the lives of our great-grandmothers
resonate in our own.
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