A Short History of Women: A Novel
Kate Walbert
Simon & Schuster
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416594994
Summary
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" (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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1961
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—M.A., New York University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; O. Henry Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York and Stony Creek,
Connecticut
Kate Walbert made her writing debut in 1998 with Where She Went, a collection of interlinked stories about the lives and travels of a mother and daughter. Marion moves frequently, a lifestyle that never permits her to form a stable identity. Her daughter Rebecca, by contrast, travels with the intent of "finding herself," but only becomes more and more rootless in the process. The New York Times named Where She Went a Notable Book of 1998 and said that it "contains many quick flashes of beauty...it goes far and takes us with it."
In 2001 she published The Gardens of Kyoto —a bittersweet story about the friendship between two cousins prior to World War II. The novel is based on her Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Award–winning story of the same name.
Walbert has published fiction and articles in the Paris Review, Double Take, New York Times, and numerous other publications. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. She teaches writing at Yale University and lives in New York City and Stony Creek, Connecticut. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Walbert's books have all dealt...with the lives of women, but this one is her most ambitious and as if to reflect the non-linear progress of feminism. Walbert also utilizes compression and flashback to sweep through time, her style reminiscent of a host of innovative writers from Virginia Woolf to Muriel Spark to Pat Barker…A Short History deals with complicated women living in complicated times, and if it is empathetic, it is also disturbing, as all moral conundrums are. It is a witty and assured testament to the women's movement and women writers, obscure and renowned.
Valerie Sayers - Washington Post
Nearly everything about Kate Walbert's new novel is wickedly smart…Walbert's primary concerns—unlike those of some of her characters—aren't political. Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times Book Review
With a sharp eye and deft touch, Walbert explores the ways women’s priorities and freedoms have evolved even as their yearnings have stayed remarkably constant. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Walbert—2004 National Book Award nominee for Our Kind—offers a beautiful and kaleidoscopic view of the 20th century through the eyes of several generations of women in the Townsend family. The story begins with Dorothy Townsend, a turn-of-the-century British suffragist who dies in a hunger strike. From Dorothy's death, Walbert travels back and forth across time and continents to chronicle other acts of self-assertion by Dorothy's female descendants. Dorothy's daughter, Evelyn, travels to America after WWI to make her name in the world of science-and escape from her mother's infamy. Decades later, her niece, also named Dorothy, has a late-life crisis and gets arrested in 2003 for taking photos of an off-limits military base in Delaware. Dorothy's daughters, meanwhile, struggle to find meaning in their modern bourgeois urban existences. The novel takes in historical events from the social upheaval of pre-WWI Britain to VJ day in New York City, a feminist conscious-raising in the '70s and the Internet age. The lives of these women reveal that although oppression of women has grown more subtle, Dorothy's self-sacrifice reverberates through generations. Walbert's look at the 20th century and the Townsend family is perfectly calibrated, intricately structured and gripping from page one.
Publishers Weekly
When 34-year-old British feminist Dorothy Townsend intentionally starves herself to death to win attention for women's suffrage, she leaves behind two children. It's 1914, and the pair is separated, never to reunite. Walbert's latest work—her previous novel, Our Kind, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist—imagines the impact of Townsend's suicide on four successive generations of Townsend women, all of them named Dorothy. Was the act a sign of desperation, a brilliant way to divert attention from an impending world war, or a selfish renunciation of maternal obligation? Walbert's intricately layered novel examines the past 100 years with subtlety and wit, simultaneously addressing the ways historical memory intrudes and recedes in individual lives. It's gripping, intense, and powerful. Walbert's language is elegant, her images resonant. Characters are recognizable but not clichéd and will stay with readers as wise, if also flawed and struggling, exemplars of political and intellectual engagement. Highly recommended for all contemporary fiction collections.
Eleanor J. Bador - Library Journal
Five generations of willful, restless women struggle to find an identity beyond that of wife and mother. Dorothy Trevor Townsend bequeathes one heck of a legacy when she dies at age 34 in 1914. The British suffragette starves herself to death as an act of civil disobedience, leaving behind two fatherless children and a married lover. Her act is doubly shocking, occurring as it does during the carnage of World War I. Dorothy's son Thomas ends up with family friends in California, becomes a musician and dies young of alcoholism. Daughter Evelyn endures wartime deprivations at boarding school before finding her way to America as well. She becomes a well-known chemistry professor at Barnard, eschewing traditional attachments and family life. Thomas's daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett, takes a different route, marrying and producing three children, only to realize in her 70s that she has always been miserable. So she protests the Iraq war, divorces her devoted husband Charles and starts a blog, to the horror of her responsible eldest daughter Caroline. With an empty nest and a divorce of her own, Caroline is stunned to recognize the role that fear has played in her life. Caroline's sister Liz, like the others, has talent and brains, but late motherhood and a busy, privileged life in Manhattan have made her question what it all means. When Liz was a child, she slipped into her mother's purse a verse she'd written that contained the line "I am a hollow bone." It resonates throughout the lives of all these women: "It's as if I echo, or rather, feel in myself an absence," says Dorothy Barrett. "I feel as if I've forgotten something, as if there's a question I forgot to answer." Walbert (Our Kind, 2004, etc.) is careful to give equal weight to their challenges through different eras. The male characters are not as fully fleshed out as they could be, but Charles' longing for the wife he never really had is quite moving. Daring and devastating: 20th-century history made personal.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Throughout the novel, Walbert consistently reveals future events before they occur—from Father Fairfield's death to Dorothy Townsend (Barrett's) impending divorce. Why do you think she chooses to do this? How does this change the pacing of the story?
2. How is Evelyn's release of the canary symbolic of her own desires? (p.15) Why do you think she gets so angry when the bird refuses to leave on its own? How does she feel once it is gone? How does this parallel the actions that Evelyn eventually takes?
3. The novel opens with Evelyn Charlotte Townsend's mother starving herself for her cause, a death "brought on by modern ideas, pride, acertain vanity or rather, unreasonable expectations." (p. 76) How does her death spur on the next generation of this family? How do you think things would have been different if she had not died? Would Evelyn and subsequent Townsend generations have been as bold as they were? Why or why not?
4. Discuss how all the women in the novel struggle between their rebellious ideals and trying to lead a "normal" life. Do you believe Dorothy when she says that she "didn't sign on for this?" (p. 74)
5. How did you feel when Evelyn lied to Stephen Pope about her family? Why do you think she says "I'll start from nothing...I am now no one's daughter." (p. 90) Does she really reject her past or is she more like her mother than she wants to admit?
6. Each of the women in the novel at one point or another rejects the life they are leading. The most notable instance is Dorothy Townsend's (Barrett) radical change following her son's death. Discuss how each of the women, like Dorothy Townsend, "shed a skin." (p. 104)
7. Discuss the theme of loss in A Short History of Women. What are the major losses that each character experiences? How does this affect the women they are and the women they become?
8. Evie has a long standing relationship with Stephen Pope and has a love for him that she claims is "not what a woman's love should be or look like, absent, as it is, a family, a husband." (p. 173) Yet, they have a very solid and caring relationship. How does this compare to someone like Dorothy Townsend (Barrett) who has a husband she no longer loves?
9. How does Fran's question of "Did you ever ruin your life for a feeling?" (p. 191) reflect the struggles that each woman has experienced? What is Elizabeth's response to Fran's question? Do you think she believes her response? What do you think her response would be if asked the same question about her mother?
10. Which of Dorothy's descendants do you think best embodies her strength and will for the cause? Which do you think embodies it the least? Why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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