Two Serious Ladies

By Jane Bowles

Book Overview

Jane Bowles's avant-garde study of women breaking free from the bonds of convention is itself a master class in liberation from the constraints of everyday thinking, form, and feeling.

Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip themselves of propriety and descend into debauchery--and it now appears with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.

Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield each embark on their own voyage of discovery and emancipation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, but finds herself descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars, while Miss Goering engages in increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience--and the reader transformed by the devastating wit and strange clarity with which Bowles writes of society and women's place in it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250376564
• ISBN13: 9781250376565
• Release Date: August 2025
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

One of my favorite novels

This is fiction for persons who can accept of their fiction the same things they expect of life: slipping, sliding, blind-turning, colliding, parting, bewilderment, and a great deal of sly humor. Life does not dole out sane rational narratives. The eternal mystery is why people expect fiction to do so. Does fiction for them represent a means of imposing form on life?

I like it

Two serious ladies is a very strange book. The first time I read it I didn't quite undestand it but it caught me instantly. Jane Bowle's style is amazing. Circles and circles of rare relationships, quear people, exotic and everyday's ambients, perfect sentences, subtle humour forms this authentic masterpiece.Once read, it will stay in your mind. Why do these women behave as they do?, what is Bowles triying to tell us? It's all crypt. You can read it and read it all over again and again and your conclusions will change.Bowle's other writing (a play and short fiction)has the same quality: refreshing, new, modern. Nothing you will read will present you such an original brain. After all our tradition is that of sinners

Two Serious Ladies

With shrewd wit, candour and a touch of the bizarre, Two Serious Ladies follows the demise into debauchery of two very dissimilar yet equally stodgy women, who aquire a fondness for eccentric personages. Christina Goering - rich, saintly spinster - turns high class call girl, whilst Frieda Copperfield - caught in a respectable, though staid marriage - abandons her husband for Pacifica, a Panamanian prostitute. The restless, autonomous, asexual female seeking self determination independent from men is a poignant theme which Jane Bowles explores with remarkable cleverness, hilarity and ruthless originality.Two Serious Ladies is a marvellous example of Jane Bowles' extraordinary talent as a writer of contemporary fiction - often obscured by her small literary output and the talent of her husband, writer Paul Bowles ... unfortuately so.