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Explore Essays and memoir

A Kept Woman

Laura Bell

‘I find myself walking the high trail between fear and love.’

Other Women

Francine Prose

‘Feminism is as basic to my sense of self as the fact that I have brown eyes.’

Gentlemen

Eudora Welty

‘There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down.’

We’re Not in This Together

Janice Galloway

‘Abstain was the only advice we were getting.’

Bad Women, Good Feminists?

Damian Barr

‘I was told I was not a feminist and never could be, because I was a man.’

To the Lighthouse

Helen Dunmore

‘There are novels which have an almost uncanny power to renew themselves in the reader’s imagination.’

Mona’s Story

Urvashi Butalia

‘I’m a woman, I’ve always wanted to be one, it’s that simple.’

Selling Your First Soul

Kseniya Melnik

‘The Russia of my memories was largely imaginary – a cauldron of nostalgia-tinted material, which I calibrated with scrupulous research.’

Like We Are

Binnie Kirshenbaum

‘My father can speak just fine. Nonetheless, he does not speak to me; nor I to him.’

Boar

Leo Mellor

‘A rustle in the bracken; then, almost immediately, a snout and some wiry black hair.’

On Riker’s Island

David McConnell

‘A lifelong backlog of unimparted knowledge must corrode the flesh.’

My Body

Sarah Manguso

‘When I was twenty-one I became a citizen of the hospital.’

Edenvale

Mark Gevisser

‘The city was also a place of possibility and even, paradoxically, liberation.’