Social comedy with teeth.

Down Among the Women tracks a cluster of women bound by family, resentment, and habit, circling around men who are often peripheral yet structurally central. Marriages fray, generational tensions harden, small acts of rebellion or submission accumulate into something harder.

The tone is brisk, often funny, but not particularly forgiving. Weldon’s interest is in how roles are inherited, how expectations settle into the body, how easily people become trapped in scripts they half-recognise. It reads quickly, but there’s a cold clarity underneath the humour that lingers.

Penguin paperback reprint (mid-1980s; originally published 1971). Light to moderate edgewear and rubbing; minor creasing to covers; pages toned, text clean.