Their novels and stories, collectively speaking, constituted our Book of Wisdom.The condition, of course, was that we were young women, and that Marriage and Motherhood was the territory upon which our battle with Life was expected to be pitched. As we were intellectually ambitious girls, English majors whose relation to literature was intensely personal, it was to fiction that we looked for ways to circumvent the conventions we were expected to live out. This was a tricky business, as literature itself was divided on the issue. If we read Henry James or George Eliot, and imagined ourselves Isabel Archer or Dorothea Brooke, it meant that while an intelligent girl could put up a good fight, she was ineluctably headed for pedestrian tragedy at the hands of some deceptively worthy man (if we read Thomas Hardy, the tragedy was not so pedestrian). It was only in the work of Colette and McCarthy—neither on the syllabus of any lit course I ever took—that we saw two gloriously shocking spins put on the narrative that we’d grown up believing was our destiny.In neither of these writers did marriage or motherhood figure at all.
