Selected and introduced by Hermione Lee, The Secret Self 2 gathers short fiction by women across the twentieth century, moving between domestic unease, private rebellion, erotic confusion, class pressure, memory, loneliness, appetite and dread.
The anthology brings together major names — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty, Patricia Highsmith, Bessie Head, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro — alongside writers whose work deserves to sit in the same room without being treated as footnotes.
These stories are sharp, strange, funny, bruised, observant and sometimes quietly vicious. There are houses with too much feeling in them, marriages with hairline fractures, children watching adult life curdle, women withholding themselves from the roles arranged for them, and characters discovering that the self is not a secret because it is hidden, but because other people keep misreading it.
It is the kind of anthology that suits dipping, teaching, re-reading, or leaving beside the bed for when a full novel feels too obedient. A strong pick for readers interested in women’s short fiction, modernism, literary anthologies, domestic gothic, feminist literary history, and stories that know politeness is often where the worst material is stored.
First published in Great Britain by J.M. Dent & Sons in 1987. Paperback, Everyman Fiction / Dent edition. Good used condition: light cover wear, mild creasing and handling, pages lightly toned, binding intact. A very solid reading copy with excellent contents.
