A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A review by Rebecca Donner
Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries -- relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert's remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy's method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. "I was afraid I would break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word," she says, and likens her mother's emaciated body to "cracked sticks and hard as that." The quiet, detached tone of Evelyn's narration convincingly evokes her shock in confronting tragedy. Later, crossing the Atlantic on the SS Woodrow Wilson, the orphaned Evelyn dispassionately renounces any connection to her once-beloved mother: "I have sworn I'll start...
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Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
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