Two Serious Ladies
by Bowles, Jane
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This novel is the only novel ever written by Jane Bowles, now reissued with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.
The story follows two upper-class women, Christina Goering and Mrs. Frieda Copperfield, who each embark on their own radical journey of emancipation and self-discovery. Christina, raised in a privileged New York family, finds herself in increasingly unconventional and reckless encounters as she seeks transcendence. Mrs. Copperfield travels to Panama with her husband, only to descend into a shadowy world of brothels and moral unmooring.
At the end of the novel, the two women meet again, transformed by their separate experiences—and the reader is left to reckon with Bowles’s devastating wit and strange clarity as she deconstructs society, propriety and gender.
"My favorite book. I can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic." — Tennessee Williams"What distinguishes Bowles’s work … isn’t its interest in nonconformity but its obsession with spiritual transformation." — Nicole Flattery, Harper’s Magazine
"Bowles’s spare, elliptical prose has a hallucinatory quality, pierced by moments of startling clarity and wit. Her characters retain a sphinx-like opacity, as unsettling as it is engrossing." — Lettie Ransley, The Guardian