Two Serious Ladies is the only novel by avant-garde literary star and wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles—a modernist cult-classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery—updated with an introduction by Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Emperor's Children and The Woman Upstairs.
Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield embark on separate quests of salvation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels. Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience.

Two Serious Ladies: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

BOWLES, Jane

United States

Ecco

The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles (Viking Portable Library)

BOWLES, Paul.

Penguin??Books

This novel, which has been hailed as a landmark in twentieth-century American literature, is the story of two staid but very different women going to pieces as they pursue their own eccentric paths to freedom, and the story follows their decline into debauchery. Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster in pursuit of sainthood ends up as a high-class call-girl, and Frieda Copperfield, abandons her dull husband for the love of a prostitute while travelling in Central America. The book is compelling and thought-provoking, and Bowles's original prose style makes it an experience to read.

Two Serious Ladies (Penguin Modern Classics)

Sage, Lorna

Contemporary

Penguin Classics

In this collection of short fiction, ranging from North Africa to South American, Bowles explores her fascination with the hidden lives of apparently ordinary middle-aged women.

Plain Pleasures (Penguin Modern Classics)

Penguin Putnam~trade

Janes Bowles has for many years had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of the twentieth century. This collection of expertly crafted short fiction will fully acquaint all students and scholars with the author Tennessee Williams called "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters."

My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed, her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives. Whether focused on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom in the novella Two Serious Ladies, or on the doomed efforts of the neighbors Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry to form a connection out of their very different loneliness in "Plain Pleasures," or on the bittersweet cultural collision of an American wife and a peasant woman in Morocco in "Everything Is Nice," Jane Bowles creates whole worlds out of the unexpressed longings of individuals, adrift in their own lives, whether residing in their childhood homes or in faraway lands that are somehow both stranger and more familiar than what they left behind.

Eccentric, adventurous Christina Goering Meets the anxious but equally enterprising Mrs. Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience.Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, Two Serious Ladies is a daring, original work that defies analysis.

Two Serious Ladies

Literary

Plume

Tells the story of Christina Goering, an eccentric heiress obsessed with religion, and her companion, the enigmatic Lucy Gamelon

The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

Poetry

PETER OWEN.

Peter Owen Publishers

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BOWLES, Jane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BOWLES, Jane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BOWLES, Jane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Two Serious Ladies: A Novel

The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles (Viking Portable Library)

Two Serious Ladies (Penguin Modern Classics)

Plain Pleasures (Penguin Modern Classics)

My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

Two Serious Ladies

Two Serious Ladies

The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

Two Serious Ladies