WestportREADS: A Short History of Women

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries, and her granddaughter Dorothy Townsend Barrett, who focuses her grief over the loss of her son by repeatedly defying the ban on photographing the bodies of dead soldiers returned to Dover Air Force base from Iraq. The contemporary chapters chronicle Dorothy Barrett's girls, both young professionals embarrassed by their mother's activism and baffled when she leaves their father after fifty years of marriage. 

Walbert deftly explores the ways in which successive generations of women have attempted to articulate what the nineteenth century called the woman question. Her novel is a moving reflection on the tides of history, and how the lives of our great-grandmothers resonate in our own. (Continue reading from GoodReads)
 

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About the Author

Kate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Georgia, Texas, Japan and Pennsylvania, among other places. She is the author of the novels The Sunken Cathedral, among the San Francisco Chronicle’s best books of 2015; A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Gardens of Kyoto, as well as the linked stories, Where She Went. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories. (Continue reading from Author's Website)