Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives

by Carolyn Kay Steedman and Carolyn Steedman

Book Overview

This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don't quite work. It has a childhood at its centre - my childhood, a personal past - and it is about the disruption of that fifties childhood by the one my mother had lived out before me, and the stories she told about it.'

Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813512581
• ISBN13: 9780813512587
• Release Date: October 1987
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Landscape for great writing

As I was comprising a reading list for my graduate students, I was suddenly reminded of Steedman's slim historical-novella-theory book that towers over so many other creative and academic achievements. Steedman offers one of the most nuanced readings of marxism's link with psychoanalysis into an incredibly personal memoir. Beyond categorization, Steedman's work is absolutely essential reading. In particular, she brilliantly highlights the way in which class is effaced within the academy: "I read a woman's book, meet such a woman at a party (a woman now, like me) and think quite deliberately as we talk: we are divided: a hundred years ago I'd have been cleaning your shoes. I know this and you don't."

Looking for the New Look Woman

An absorbing memoir of the author's childhood in post WWII London. Steedman's mother was a chronically dissatisfied working-class woman angry about her life of material deprivation. She was, in Steedman's words, part of a "subterranean culture of longing for what one can never have." Her anger extended to her two daughters--she told them, "If it wasn't for you two, I'd be off somewhere else." Steedman uses fairy tales, psychoanalytic theory and working class biographies to try to make sense of her mother's malaise. Her mother's unmet needs were personified in her desire for enough fabric to sew herself dresses in the fabric-intensive "New Look" style introduced by Dior in 1947--a style that compensated for the deprivations of wartime clothing rations. Naturally, she blamed her daughters for the fact that she didn't have the money. This lead to Steedman having a recurring (and fascinating) childhood dream about a woman in a flowing New Look coat trapped in a revolving door. It's a Hitchcockian dream image, one of visual complexity and psychological truth. Steedman's mother stubbornly resists her daughter's painful attempts to come to terms with her maternal indifference and the odd sense of class rebellion that led her to join the Conservative Party. In the end, Steedman is left going in circles, not unlike the chic woman of her persistent dream. But she creates an unforgettable portrait of her mother, an unknowable woman who yearned for a life of luxury and respectability that defied both political and psychological stereotypes about how poor women "should" behave.

Important contribution to historical discourse...

'Landscape for a Good Woman' marks a turning point in how history is written. In the start of the book, Steedman acknowledges that she is not writing a history for everyone (she even denies that her book is a work of history). Instead, through what she says is an act of 'particularizing', Steedman has demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the individual histories of 'lower class' or 'working class' people and families that are often over looked due to an array of social, economic, political, and psychological confines that dominate discourse in each of these areas. Whether being read as a feminist critique of male dominated society, a working class critique of upper class dominated society, or a critique of the discipline of history, this book offers a world of information and ideas. It is short and very dense but excellently written. Each sentence is worth rereading as the reader will quickly discover that multiple lessons can be gleamed from each thought Steedman presents. Through being told from the perspective of Steedman as her mother's daughter, the book demonstrates how the past shapes the present and how the two seemingly separate regions are actually tangled and inseparable. This book is worth every second it takes to read, and the time you'll spend thinking it over well after it has found its place on your shelf.