Two Serious Ladies: A Novel

by Jane Bowles, Sheila Heti (Introduction)

Overview

Jane Bowles’s avant-garde study of women breaking free from the bonds of convention is itself a master class in liberation from the constraints of everyday thinking, form, and feeling.

Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated modernist Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip off their propriety and descend into debauchery—and it now appears with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.

The book’s two serious ladies want to break away from the constraints of being themselves. Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield each embark on their own voyage of discovery and emancipation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, but finds herself falling in love with a prostitute and descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars. Miss Goering abandons her family for an austere island existence, only to yield to a series of increasingly sordid encounters with strange men.

At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience; the reader transformed by the devastating wit, strange clarity, and lack of nicety with which Jane Bowles vivisects society and women’s place in it

Two Serious Ladies is transgressive and thrilling. As Mrs. Copperfield declares, “I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which I never had before.”

This new edition weds Bowles’s daring and her authority as we restore her to her rightful place as an unparalleled modernist writer and thinker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250376572
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272

About the Author

Jane Bowles wrote only one novel, a play, and just over a dozen short stories. But these were enough to establish her reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most original fiction writers. Born in New York City in 1917, she later married the author Paul Bowles. At the age of forty, she suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.
Jane Bowles has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. Born in New York City in 1917, she lived in Tangier, Morocco, with her husband, Paul Bowles, from 1952 until her death in 1973.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto.