I'll suggest The Company Parade by Storm Jameson, which is a novel set between the wars in Britain. The main Character is a woman who leaves her husband and child in the country to come to London to become a writer. It's part of a trilogy, and I really became engrossed in that world.
Also, totally on the other end of the spectrum is The Passion According to GH, by Clarice Lispector. Lispector was a Brazilian writer in the 1960's and 70's. The plot of this novel is "woman kills a cockroach". It's been described as what Kafka would have written if he was a woman.
Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and/or "Three Guineas"?
Or Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, [link] which is slighter, but a good read.
Oh, man. That book, along with Bastard Out of Carolina and The Book of Ruth, made me wary of "Southern women's fiction" as a genre for years.
If you're willing to deal with a bit of preachiness, there's Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The gender-role stuff is huge and explicit and a bit biased (women=creative force for good, men=you can imagine), but I found them interesting.
I recommend Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, or Grace Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man (which is a short story collection)
If you're willing to deal with a lot of preachiness, try Tepper's The Fresco. I think she takes the feminism and twists it into something ugly, but it might be good fodder for some heated discussion.
...try Tepper's The Fresco. I think she takes the feminism and twists it into something ugly, but it might be good fodder for some heated discussion.
I think she does that a lot.
It's more unusual for Tepper when one of her books doesn't make someone feel that way, in fact.
Thanks for all the great suggestions.
I knew the hivemind wouldn't let me down.
I love Atwood and Paley and sometimes Lippmann(Although she's a life-stealing heffa and I don't like her series books as well as the stand-alones. Which is not related to the heffa issue.)
Off-topic, Corwood: thanks for the pimpage.
