Top

We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.

Two Serious Ladies

On sale

17th March 2022

Price: £8.99

Select a format

Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781474620406

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

‘My favourite book. I can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic’ Tennessee Williams
‘The book I give as a gift . . . It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit’ Sheila Heti
A modern legend . . . A very funny writer’ Truman Capote
‘Profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanely true’ Claire Messud

I am going on a trip. Wait until I tell you about it. it’s terrible.

Miss Goering, an eccentric, impulsive New York heiress, resides in her house and tries not to be unhappy.

Mrs Copperfield, an anxious, dutiful married woman, has a great fear of drowning, of lifts, of intruders in the night.

Two serious ladies, nothing is natural for them and anything is possible.

For Mrs Copperfield – a trip to Panama, where she abandons her husband for love of a local prostitute. For Miss Goering – a move to a squalid little house on an island and a series of sordid encounters with strangers. Both go to pieces -and both realise this is something they’ve wanted to do for years.

With an introduction by Naoise Dolan
A W&N Essential

What's Inside

Read More Read Less

Reviews

Claire Messud
A thoroughly original mind - a mind at once profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanely true.
Truman Capote
A modern legend ... A very funny writer ... with at [her] heart the subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness.
Alan Sillitoe
A landmark in 20th century American literature.
Ali Smith
Readers who've not yet read Jane Bowles are almost to be envied, like people who've still to read Austen or Mansfield or Woolf, and have all the delight, the literary satisfaction, the shock of classic originality, the revelation of such good writing, still to come.
John Ashberry
One of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.
Sheila Heti, author of MOTHERHOOD
The book I give as a gift is the novel TWO SERIOUS LADIES by Jane Bowles. Her sentences are so surprising, the plot is like something from a dream, and her mind is deeply unfathomable, precise, funny, earnest and otherworldly. It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit.
Tennessee Williams
My favourite book. I can't think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic.
Lorna Sage
With TWO SERIOUS LADIES, Bowles joined the small company of women modernists who celebrated their freakishness in the highest style.