'The Awakening' & 'Anna Karenina'

I've said this before, but Chopin gets Edna to the same place Tolstoy gets Anna in a 10th of the time.

Edna and Anna are merely two tiles in the great mosaic of morose women in literature. From Emma Bovary to the Little Women and all the heroines of Austin and the Bronte sisters, the legacy is deep and impactful.

As much as we could celebrate these great characters -- angry, disenfranchises, unsatisfied and sad -- the larger picture here is that women perhaps were not enslaved but the intentions were just the same.

Life prospects were slim, they were kept tethered to the idea that your worth was tied to whoever was married to you. That contentment was the ceiling, and shame and uncertainty were the bottom of the ocean.

Edna chose the bottom of the ocean. Anna, a train.

'The Diaries of Jane Somers'

Doris Lessing was a badass six ways to Sunday. 

She was born in Iran (back in the good ol' days when it was referred to as Persia) in 1919 and later moved to Rhodesia before striking out on her own. She got a late start in writing. She started in the 1950s and went well into the next century including the novels The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could ... which were combined as The Diaries of Jane Somers. 

Lessing, though, was brave. Early on she made her socialist views very public, and even moved to London and abandoned some children along the way with their fathers. She protested nuclear weapons and apartheid, which got her blocked from visiting South Africa and Rhodesia. She later left the communist party after the USSR invaded Hungary and was critical of the war in Afghanistan. The British government spied on her and released their dossier years later. She had to have been doing something right. 

Lessing had been grocery shopping when it was announced that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. 

'Nine Tailors' & 'Murder Must Advertise'

Are we doing this again? 

Are we back in the saddle? 

Truth is, it never really stopped.