Two Serious Ladies

Description

Few great writers produced less than Jane Bowles: one novel, one play and a dozen short stories. Yet hers is one of the most original, unique voices in twentieth century American literature. A novelist with an essentially tragic view, as Truman Capote concludes in his memoir, but also 'a very funny writer . with at [her] heart the subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness.' Here, then, is a novel unlike any other. A tale of two extraordinary heroines - Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster in pursuit of sainthood, and Frieda Copperfield, who finds a home from home in a Panama brothel. And a book whose lesbian themes were startling on its original publication in 1943.

Jane Bowles (Jane Auer, 1917-73) was born in New York. As a teenager she fell into a bohemian, bisexual scene in Greenwich Village, where she met the writer and composer Paul Bowles, whom she married in 1938. Their honeymoon in Central America provided the locale and incidents for Two Serious Ladies. Jane settled in Morocco in 1948, living in a flat below Paul; although both homosexual, they were devoted companions. Her play, In The Summer House, was performed on Broadway in 1953. She wrote little more, suffering a stroke in 1957, after which her health declined. She died in Malaga, Spain, aged just fifty-six.

Readers who've not yet read Jane Bowles are almost to be envied, like people who've still to read Austen or Mansfield or Woolf, and have all the delight, the literary satisfaction, the shock of classic originality, the revelation of such good writing, still to come. -- Ali Smith