Always check our opening hours to see if we are open, but as a general rule, we are closed on bank holidays!

We will be back on Monday at our normal opening hours – thank you.

This means that the April session of the Writers’ space has been moved ahead to Saturday 31st March 2012 and you can come and visit the library then.

The library will re-open on Thursday 12th April with our usual opening times.

But as a bonus it will stay open until 7pm, so why not visit us after work today? We can tell you all the things we’ve been up to for International Women’s Day!

“REBEL REBEL”

on Thursday 8th March 2012 from 2pm

the Feminist Library will be opening its doors to
welcome you for a day of bookstalls, food, drinks, discussions and
celebration of rebellious women.

Colorama Cinema (coloramacinema.tumblr.com) will be hosting our rebel film screenings –
Agnés Varda’s French new-wave masterpiece Clèo from 5 to 7 (5pm)
followed by Libertarias Vicente Aranda’s evocative portrait  of female militia in the Spanish Civil War (9pm).

Our lovely friends from 56a infoshop (56a.org.uk) will be helping us
to provide a feast of Spanish and South American food
with vegan options available.

Copious quantities of tea and cake will abound,
as well as a bar and a crèche (please book in advance).
Please join us in making this a great fundraiser for the library and a
wonderful International Women’s Day.

We would love nothing more than to have you march with us under the now famous vintage red banner – so if you would like to march with us, come and meet us in front of Selfridges, at the corner of Oxford Street and Orchard Street at 12.30 on Saturday 3rd March (map).

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