Description: Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated modernist Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip off their propriety and descend into debauchery.
The book's two serious ladies want to break away from the constraints of being themselves. 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 falling in love with a prostitute and descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars. Miss Goering abandons her family for an austere island existence, only to yield to a series of increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience; the listener transformed by the devastating wit, strange clarity, and lack of nicety with which Jane Bowles vivisects society and women's place in it. This new edition weds Bowles's daring and her authority as we restore her to her rightful place as an unparalleled modernist writer and thinker.Brief description: 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.