In which I ramble on, but don't necessarily make a coherent point...

[poison_penny]

It's not normal for me to have a bone to pick with Foyles. Generally, though it lacks the eccentric, shambolic air that defined it once upon a time, I like Foyles. It's layout is nice and airy, it always picks interesting, often obscure titles to put out on its tables, not just bestsellers or heavily promoted titles, and it's staff are intelligent

Comments

[tempore]

I always found "women (or men) of color" amusing, too. I guess I fall into the category of lacking color. Alas... my only hopes of someone seeing me are if I turn red or blue. Sounds woefully unhealthy in any sense; apparently, I'm best represented by frail creatures prone to fainting and consumption after overextending themselves with a stroll along the moors

[roseability_]

Very quick comment: female friendships weren't really considered to be valuable until post-WW1, when there was a large dearth of men, and so there was this whole generation of women who had no one to marry, and thus their paths in life were either open, or completely lacking, depending on your view of the time. Because of this, it became more acceptable for women to have very close female friends. Could this perhaps be part of the problem in literature?

I too have noticed the lack of female friendships. In my overly-ambitious teenage years I was going to write a novel and one of the big things was going to be the friendship between the main character and her best friend. I wanted them to be just solid. One of those friendships which you know isn't going to change - the idea being that perhaps at times they would spend less time with each other because of boyfriends or commitments and stuff, but in the end, they would always be there for each other. And I noticed that there weren't many books about friendship. Which seems odd.

[tempore]

What's sad is that there are still so few books depicting strong, solid female friendships-- and those that do are often dismissed (sometimes rightly, sometimes not) as "chicklit

[poison_penny]

When you first said that pre-Woolf novels didn't centre on female friendships, I immediately thought of all the nineteenth century novels that have them . Of course their stories are nearly always subordinate to the main plot- that of marriage. But I realised that none of these friendhsips survive- whether through death or moving apart, and they all do conform, somewhat, to Beauvoir's position. Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, Jane Eyre and Helen, Becky Sharp and Amelia, Lucy and Mina Harker...the only successful female friendship I can think of is Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, but that's only because Marian is unattractive and will remain a spinster. And of course sisters are allowed because they're family. It seems as if the idea of friendships being sustained is almost a moot point; the rite of passage, the transition between unmarried girl and married female is to break off contact with your female friends