The women come and go, a novel in three parts

Abstract

Focusing on the stories of three women shaped by the expectations and attitudes of the times in which they live, my novel covers the periods 1921-1937, 1937-1972, and 1973 and participates in the discourse on women's changing historical circumstances and new class and gender identities. It therefore can be read in the category of a novel of manners or a middlebrow novel. My purpose has been to explore, through creating my own characters and story, the dramatic social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place in the middle part of the twentieth century for Western women. In tracing the trajectory from one generation to the next, my fiction responds to and is inflected by the style of narration obtaining at the time. It engages, for instance, with the "reality" constructed by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Christa Wolf, and Margaret Drabble within the genre of women's fiction: of women writing for each other, in a small-scale and intimate way, and integrating the story of an individual life with the circumstances of the time. My aim has been, through writing fiction, to re-examine certain concepts of the past for myself and for the contemporary reader in order to reach slightly different conclusions and to begin to understand the past in a new way.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Shelley Cobb: orcid.org/0000-0003-1153-8482

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