Desperate housewives eat your heart out.

First published in 1977, The Women’s Room is a landmark feminist novel that refuses to soften its edges. It follows Mira Ward and a wide circle of women as they move through marriage, motherhood, work, sexuality, and political awakening in mid-20th-century America.

Domestic life here is an arrangement. A place where intimacy becomes a site of power, and education a delayed but destabilising force. The novel’s strength lies in its accumulation — conversations, compromises, rage, boredom, solidarity — until personal dissatisfaction coheres into political consciousness.

Often described as divisive, The Women’s Room remains bracing precisely because it does not aim to be likeable.