The Claustrophobic Menace of Boarding-School Fiction

The writer Rachel Cusk opens her 2009 essay “Shakespeare’s Daughters” by asking, “Can we … identify something that could be called ‘women’s writing’?” What Cusk seeks is “not simply a literature made by women but one that arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions.” Why, she asks, don’t more women writers strive to describe the frustrations and limitations of life under patriarchy, which, “being a type of relationship, can never be resolved, only reconfigured”? Why not write “the book of repetition,” with female characters kept in place by social and perhaps biological constraints?

Cusk suggests that male-dominated literary culture may discourage such work. She notes, too, that it is “pleasanter”—more exciting, more trilogy, Sheila Heti’s , Sally Rooney’s These novels use repetition in two ways: They are cyclical in structure, and they have protagonists prone to mirroring both the people around them and their own past selves. The results are aching portraits of entrapment, and have resonated strongly with readers. Still, by design, they offer little hope. Of course, not all writers aspire to model progress; nor do all readers seek such models. But for some, the pure “book of repetition” may prove less appealing than the hybrid approach two recent novels have taken. Scarlett Thomas’s and Clare Beams’s first use a Cusk-like method to depict women’s subjugation, then turn, in their last act, toward change.