Two Serious Ladies

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.

Jane Bowles wrote only one novel, a play, and just over a dozen short stories. But these were enough to establish her reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most original fiction writers. Born in New York City in 1917, she later married the author Paul Bowles. At the age of forty, she suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.