Published in 2025 (first published 1943)
174 pages
Jane Auer Bowles has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. Born in New York City in 1917, she lived in Tangier, Mexico, with her husband, Paul Bowles, from 1952 until her death in 1973. Though she only wrote one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation.
What is this book about?
Jane Bowles’s avant-garde study of women breaking free from the bonds of convention is itself a master class in liberation from the constraints of everyday thinking, form, and feeling.
Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip themselves of propriety and descend into debauchery—and it now appears with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.
Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield each embark on their own voyage of discovery and emancipation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, but finds herself descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars, while Miss Goering engages in increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience—and the reader transformed by the devastating wit and strange clarity with which Bowles writes of society and women’s place in it.
