Originally written around 438 B.C. the classical Euripidean tragedy portrays Alcestis as a modest and devoted wife who sacrifices herself in place of her condemned husband Admetus; selflessly propelling herself into the underworld. For this she is worshipped in traditional mythology as a source of purity, benevolence and as the very essence of the ideal wife.

In her modern retelling of the classic legend, Katherine Beutner weaves together a rich tapestry of fantasy and ancient mythology to portray Alcestis as a complex heroine in her own right and not merely as the wife in the story of Admetus. Our Pennsylvanian author gives the Greek princess a unique voice through which she speaks of her deepest thoughts, desires and experiences from her inception to her death and beyond when she falls into the underworld.

Beutner’s treatment of our protagonist’s motivations bears a starker sense of verisimilitude than the traditional mythology in terms of the historic period in which it is set. Her bleak debut novel demythologises the story of Alcestis and presents her to the reader as a woman in her own right. From her first breath we follow her every move as she is raised by her servants and sisters rarely seeing her patriarchal father Pelias (son of the sea god Poseidon) and king of Iolcus. In childhood she is struck a harsh blow when her beloved sister Hippothoe tragically dies and after this Alcestis harbours strong sentiment towards her and the ultimate hope of one day being re-united in the underworld.

Alcestis’ downfall into the underworld was hastened along when she reached marital age and men from far and wide competed for her hand. It was Admetus who finally triumphed though he was a condemned man doomed to die young but for the divine intervention of an Olympian debtor, the powerful god Apollo. As a young man Apollo was damned to spend a mortal year on earth and it was Admetus who gave him shelter so when Admetus’ time has come, Apollo makes the promise that he may find someone to die in his stead. Admetus is forced to plead with elder friends and family to accompany Hermes down to the underworld in his place and none comes forth, that is until Alcestis offers herself forward.

It is this moment, on the edge of mortality, that Alcestis considers her options. The ethos of her time requires a woman to have a man and so the death of her husband would simultaneously cause her own downfall; she would lose all social standing, respectability and honour. Against her husband’s will, then, Alcestis takes the liberty of departing thereby avoiding a living death. The underworld is both daunting and tantalizing and clouded with forlorn souls including the seductress Persephone. Under the influence of Persephone, Alcestis changes her character decisively, it seems that in death she blossoms into an intriguing, aggressive and wilful woman. The one failing of the novel is after her eventual rescue from the underworld where there is an all-too-rushed conclusion which fails to show how Alcestis takes these qualities back into the mortal world.

However, this is a soulful adaptation of the Greek tragedy which lends our central character the personality and backbone necessary to endure the trials and tribulations she faces. Beutner is keeping pace with a growing interest in the female perspective of traditional texts.

Review by Ruby Kearney

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Also reviewed by Harriet Brown

Alcestis is known from Greek mythology as the archetypal good wife; she loved her husband Admetus so much that she offered herself as a sacrifice to die in his place.  Katherine Beutner’s bittersweet retelling puts a feminist spin on the tale, finally giving a voice to one of mythology’s more overlooked characters.

Alcestis tells the story of her life in a society where women’s liberties are strictly curtailed and their destinies decided by the men to whom they are little more than property.  The princess Alcestis is just as much a prisoner as the slave girls who tend to her; confined to her rooms and embroidery, her sexuality and virginity are closely guarded.  When she comes of age and is put up for marriage to the highest bidder, Alcestis is won by Admetus, King of Pherae, but his love for Apollo casts a shadow over their marriage; disillusioned, she offers herself as a sacrifice out of duty rather than love.  But with this death comes a reawakening, as she loses her heart to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.

Beutner’s ancient Greece is deftly depicted as a place where the divine is normal, where immortals shaped like animals lie in wait to seize unwary maidens, and a refusal to placate the gods can lead to snakes in one’s marriage bed.  Lautner’s language is sensual and poetic, and although her unhurried pace starts to drag towards the second half of the book the ending, whilst somewhat melancholy, still offers some hope in the evidence of Alcestis’s increased autonomy.  Beutner has written a subtle and subversive book which gives us some insight into a woman whose voice has been silent too long.

A few things don’t quite add up. Penny joins fellow Zero author Nina Power in arguing for the relevance of Shulamith Firestone. Yet, despite Penny’s frequent recourse to Firestone and other second-wave thinkers like Juliet Mitchell, she refers to ‘second-wave feminism’ as if it was a monolithic chorus singing the praises of essentialism rather than the flawed but discordant rumble of emerging consciousness to which a thoughtful review of the period attests. Meat Market is a bit too derivative of Power’s excellent One-Dimensional Woman at times. I wish Penny had queried some of that book’s arguments, particularly Power’s tendency to conflate liberal feminism with Sex and the City (a problematic interpretation of feminism is not the same thing as a wholesale capitalist co-option of feminism). Penny has been criticised for embellishing her eyewitness accounts. Certainly, she’s a lone radical voice charged with representing an impossibly complex constituency. But while holding journalists like Penny to account, we should be attacking the culture that only gives one feminist the mic at a time. And do books about gender always have to be pink?

Meat Market by Laurie Penny (Zero Books, 2011)

Reviewed by Sophie Jones

So when I heard that Booker-shortlisted novelist Linda Grant had written a novel about university students of the late 1960s, and what happened to them afterwards, I sought it out. Perhaps Grant (born 1951) was going to polish up our image.

But the baby-boomer characters in We Had It So Good are a lacklustre bunch. They include Stephen, a young Californian who arrives in Oxford in 1968 on a Rhodes scholarship, gets sent down for vandalising a library book, and marries fellow-student Andrea to avoid being sent home and drafted. Andrea’s friend Grace is a poor little rich girl (“one of the ways my father went on controlling me was by putting money into my bank account”); another friend is a man called Ivan who sets up an austere anarchist squat in Islington, but escapes its discomforts to pop home to Mum and Dad’s place for proper food and a hot bath.

They are all recognizable types from that era, as would be some genuine idealists, some real poverty, some people who didn’t go to Oxford, and some serious political thought and effective activism, particularly in the realm of sexual politics. But women’s liberation, gay rights, the big industrial conflicts of the 70s and 80s, and solidarity with the put-upon peoples of Chile, southern Africa, Vietnam and Northern Ireland, are only nodded at on the pages of We Had It So Good. Stephen and Andrea evolve from anarchist squatters to Islington homeowners, he working as a BBC producer, she as a psychotherapist. Either or both of these career moves could have provided insights into what happens when idealists grow old, but because they are reported on rather than shown or examined, it’s hard to avoid a yawn at the sheer obviousness of it all.

The discomforts of reading We Had It So Good come not just from its content but also from its style. Tenses change arbitrarily, as does the point of view. A non-participating narrator tosses in remarks such as “Stephen Newman was likeable” (to whom is not clear), and clairvoyant commentary about what will one day appear on Google (once it has been invented), and what Stephen and Andrea’s children (once they have been conceived and borne, and have learned to talk) will say about their parents’ hippie past. Important “facts” about Stephen’s father’s background, presented from an apparently reliable authorial point of view, turn out to be lies.

Perhaps I deserved to be disappointed with We Had It So Good. I ought to have known that it’s not the job of novelists to make readers feel good about themselves. There are moments which sparkle: I enjoyed reading about Stephen’s secret addiction to imported American candy bars, and the careers that his and Andrea’s children follow: son Max becomes a magician, daughter Marianne a war photographer. Meanwhile, Stephen and ageing pal Ivan (soon to set off for a sun-soaked retirement on the Caribbean) bemoan the fact that their generation is so much less interesting and heroic than either the one that went before or the one that came after. And they’re right, they are less interesting, but only because that is how Linda Grant has chosen to portray them.

We Had It So Good by Linda Grant (Virago, 2011)

Reviewed by Zoe Fairbairns

From Mary Stott’s 1971 article on the Women’s Liberation movement’s recognition of their treatment as “the second sex” to Homa Khaleeli’s 2010 interview with Nawal El Saadawi, the history of feminist thought and activity has been faithfully represented in the Guardian’s pages. We are treated to provocative illustrations of public figures – Mary Stott on Margaret Thatcher and Beatrix Campbell on Princes Diana – and interviews with Camille Paglia, Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, alongside leading figures of the movement – Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Sheila Rowbotham, and Susan Brownmiller. Local concerns are equally reflected. There are pieces on the Southall Black Sisters’ campaign in defence of women accuse of killing violent men, a visit to the Spare Rib office, and, particularly poignant, Polly Toynbee’s 1971 account of the first Reclaiming the Night, where her questioning of fellow Guardian staffers about their experiences of abuse revealed just how common and unchallenged harassment was only decades ago in the UK. Chinyelu Onwurah’s 1985 piece on “the double struggle” faced by black women and disunity in the movement recalls an obstacle to the notion of sisterhood, the repercussions of which are still felt today.

The articles are accessible and often entertaining. Of note is Andrea Dworkin’s “modest proposal” in her piece about the Monica Lewinsky scandal which she acknowledged “will probably bring the FBI to my door. But I think that Hillary should shoot Bill and then President Gore should pardon her”! There is righteous anger and acerbic wit throughout the anthology, igniting or reigniting in the reader a passion for feminism and should, for this reason alone, be on every school syllabus.

From bell hooks to Beth Ditto, the period reflected in Women of the Revolution mirrors the timeline of the bulk of the library’s collection – from the Second Wave until the present day – and as such will be a useful tool for researchers here, providing a general overview of a rich and fascinating period of feminist history.

Women of the Revolution by Kira Cochrane (ed.) (Guardian Books, 2010)

In this impeccably researched biography, enriched by its sympathy for its subject, Wellcome Library archivist Lesley A. Hall illuminates a long-neglected figure and her determined campaigns for a range of issues—the vote for women, birth control, divorce reform, socialism, pacifism, and a more enlightened attitude toward sexuality among them—while establishing the importance of her work to the pro-choice cause in the UK. Hall also suggests ways in which Stella’s own life, as difficult as it is to reconstruct, may have helped shape her thought; her commitment to free love and her own experiences influenced her opinions on human sexual diversity as well as her translations of sexological works, lectures, and published work.

Born in Canada in 1880, Stella most likely had personal experience of abortion by 1915, and in 1922 she made what is likely the first argument on a public platform in Britain for legalization. This was at a time when birth control activists like Marie Stopes were distancing themselves from abortion, and even talking about contraception could get health workers fired and publishers tried for obscenity. Stella was a lone voice. As colleague Dora Russell said of the 1920s: ‘We were trying to get birth control on the way and we didn’t want a disturbance to our work.’

Even when Stella’s colleagues, including Dora Russell, joined her to form the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in 1936, Stella’s belief that a woman had an ‘absolute right to decide whether or not she would bear a child’ kept her on the radical fringe. While most ALRA activists employed the more pragmatic argument that the abortion ban was ‘a law for the rich’ that led to the death and ill health of overburdened, married, working-class mothers, Stella argued in her contribution to the 1935 book Abortion for ‘the (as yet still rather unpopular) assumption that women are really human beings, and that freedom of choice and deliberate intention are necessary for them in their sexual relations and their maternity’ and that some women were ‘not primarily maternal.’ In a 1936 speech, she argued that the ‘ban on abortion’ was ‘a sexual taboo…a survival of the veiled face, of the barred window and the locked door, of burning, branding, mutilation and stoning; of all the pain and fear inflicted ever since the grip of ownership and superstition came down on women.’

Stella did not live to see the change to abortion law in 1967—she died 12 years before—and would have no doubt been dismayed at the law’s failure to ensure a woman’s absolute right to abortion, but her activism certainly helped make change of any kind possible.  In a chronology of the movement, a younger ALRA member had ‘Stella Campaigns Alone’ as the only entry between the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (the basis for the illegality of abortion in England and Wales) and the foundation of the ALRA. At a time when anti-abortion campaigners like Nadine Dorries are attempting to roll back reproductive rights, claiming that ‘a woman seeking an abortion in this country is the victim of a well-organised industry,’ it is all the more important for the pro-choice movement to recognize the radical contributions of StellaBrowne and celebrate the legacy of her work on behalf of a woman’s absolute right—let alone competence—to choose for herself in reproductive matters.

The Life and Times of Stella Browne, Feminist and Free Spirit by Lesley A. Hall (IB Tauris, 2011)

Reviewed by Fran Bigman

Their latest works address the figure of the heroine through multinational perspectives on cultural identity. From Scotland, to Nigeria, to India, each author investigates the role that social stigma plays in the struggle for independence and fulfillment.

• Nigerian writer Olukemi Amala discusses transnationalism and identity conflict in Under an Emerald Sky, a story of two black girls coming of age in a small town in the UK.
• Macherla’s Blue Eyes follows the narrative of Angela, a teenage girl forced to participate in the Indian funerary practice of the suttee.
• White Lies by British writer Lynn Michell sets the heroine, a rule-bound army wife, against the backdrop of Kenyan tribes victimized by the politics of imperialism.

The reception will start at 7pm with drinks and refreshments followed by readings by and a discussion with the authors.
These books will also be available for purchase at the discounted price of £10 (RRP £11.99)

Please note that the library is now fully accessible.

Pick up some bargains to enjoy on holiday or curl up with on a rainy weekend at home. We warmly welcome all books, whether explicitly feminist or not. Paperback prices start at £1.50.

Tours of the library will take place throughout the day – come along and check out the collection. Refreshments and a soundtrack of summer hits will be provided. All proceeds help to keep the Feminist Library going.

When? Saturday 26th November, 2.30pm to 5.30 p.m.

Where? The Feminist Library, 5 Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1 7XW

Bring: Books and good quality bric-a-brac.

Buy: Cheap books and rare Feminist Library duplicates, our famous Feminist Library Tote Bags, vintage copies of Spare Rib magazine, and more!

RSVP: to our Facebook Event

After the book sale, we are going to take out the library’s famous red banner and join the Reclaim the Night march – come march with us, look for the red banner!

the new programme is:

1.30 – 5pm Open writer’s space – for women to come and use the library space to write in the company of other feminist women.

Al always, the ‘Writers Space’ is for feminist writers, poets, students and all others who would like to come and write in company of like minded people and be inspired by the feminist books surrounding us. It will run the first Saturday of each month between 1.30-5pm.

Please come to write, come to attend the reading group, or both!

Feel free to contact me directly on feministwritersspace@yahoo.co.uk.

Looking forward to meeting and hearing from you!

Many individuals, charities and campaigning groups could use some practical help on politics.
This workshops are aimed at getting you more involved in politics and helping you to think more like a politician.
They cover everything from lobbying MPs to communicating using political language to working with local councils.

Look at www.metheringhamowlett.co.uk for more details on individual workshops.

A special 30 year anniversary event at the Feminist Library 5 Westminster Bridge Road

Entry on donation plus additional £3 to attend film screening.

Talks, Workshops, Films, Discussions, Food, Drinks feat….

* Discussion on the history of the camp and Boise quilt led by Lynette Edwell

*  Music making workshop with the Greenham Songbook (bring instruments if you can!)

* Talk by Sasha Roseneil – author of Common women, Uncommon practices - the Queer Feminisms of Greenham Common.

*  Talk by Anna Feigenbaum about protest camps (http://protestcamps.org/)

* Short Films – Cryptic Brew & Just being There, The Women by Shelley Davies

* & the the iconic feature Carry Greenham Home by Beeban Kidron

Its going to be amazing! Don’t miss it

www.feministlibrary.co.uk

admin@feministlibrary.co.uk

0207 261 0879

no need to book – just turn up! please share widely amongst your networks