Two Serious Ladies : A Novel

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 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—and it now appears with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.

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 reader transformed by the devastating wit, strange clarity, and lack of nicety with which Jane Bowles vivisects society and women’s place in it

Two Serious Ladies is transgressive and thrilling. As Mrs. Copperfield declares, “I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which I never had before.”

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.