Lorna Sage writes beautifully about Djuna Barnes and her 1937 novel Nightwood in her essay collection, Moments of Truth.

She describes how Barnes presents “the Paris of abject carnival, a kind of human menagerie” and then Sage gives just a peek of how it was “written, rewritten and wrenched into publishable shape” so that, in the end, I really wanted to have gotten more out of my reading.

But it was around the winter holidays and borrowed as an ILL (so, not renewable last year, around this time): all I could do was read word after word, and accept that it’s one of those “great modernist works that eat up lives”—which is to say that Barnes put everything she had into it.

If that had been first in Sage’s Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth-Century Women Writers, I might have given up, but it was the sixth. And, as with the first half of her book, which I wrote about here, reading it felt as though other books in my stacks were in conversation with Sage’s selections.

Reading Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, for instance, Verso 0.1.2 offers: “I walked into a paragraph a long time ago and never emerged from it.” That’s lovely on its own isn’t it but, then—“Rhys? Yes.” (Rhys was the third. Christina Stead was the fourth and I’ll have more to say about her later this year.)

Undoubtedly, Sage could have written her book with an entirely different set of twelve, but there’s no question that her selection is canonical. Violet Trefusis is the seventh—her fifth novel, Hunt the Slipper (the second she wrote in English, published in 1927) which Sage describes as a “splendidly malicious commentary on England”.

Hunt the Slipper reminded me a little of Christina Stead’s The Beauty and the Furies, but with the sass one finds in Ivy Compton-Burnett. And I was relieved to find both character and story.

Trefusis has a knack for succinctly conjuring character, as with the two men who figure prominently: one who “loved to expatiate, to embroider, to dazzle” and prefers the company of women, and the other who “did not particularly care about women, except as part of a decorative scheme” and prefers the company of men.

Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies (1943) took me back to the incomprehension of reading Barnes, but, in the beginning it seemed to be channelling the Barbaras, mostly Pym but a dash of Comyns. And then, as the women begin to feel more comfortable expressing themselves, it become increasingly hard to follow. There are some extended and detailed scenes—in unusual settings, with a lot of dialogue—which helped me root into the story, but I never felt as though I understood the two women.

Sage was helpful on that matter, however, quoting a letter that Bowles wrote to her husband, about what it meant to be serious. And Sage adds to that: “She attached special, semi-private meaning to the word ‘serious’. For her, being serious meant risking the possibility that you were meaninglessly weird….” So I didn’t understand much of what happened, but I understood why I didn’t understand it… and sometimes that’s enough.

Back when I was reading Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Rosalind Miles, Betty Friedan, and Audre Lorde, somehow I overlooked Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949; Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier). But perhaps I did catch a glimpse of it and simply opted out, because it is nearly 800 pages long—even with teeny-tiny print and narrow margins.

It feels like it’s THE book about women, everything about women everywhere and ever. But it also feels like a classic, although the idea of women being a cultural concept more than anything else still feels relevant. This might be my favourite essay in Sage’s volume, because Sage not only succeeds in helping me understand those 800 pages, but also (with the help of others, like biographer Elaine Marks) succeeds in convincing me that I should read some other bulky de Beauvoirs.

Iris Murdoch’s The Red and the Green (1965) was on my list for two previous years but remained unfinished—barely begun, actually. It’s the thirteenth of her books I’ve read; but, actually, I hadn’t realised that until now. Quite a few I read with Liz’s readalong in mind (and she’s rereading them again, soon), my interest furthered because my friend M— counted her a favourite author.

This is the most Irish of Murdoch’s novels that I’ve read, but otherwise I enjoyed all the usual elements (intricate relationships, familial and otherwise, day-to-day navigations and negotiations in various attempts to live a “good life” but often falling short of various ideals).

This is what Sage calls Murdoch’s trick: “not to make order but to complicate order in such a way that it starts to resemble living”. Weirdly mesmerised by the orange lipstick plastered on my sepia-toned ‘60s edition, and the familiar smell of old Penguin paperbacks, I was always happy to pick up this book, at any time of the day.

Angela Carter got bumped up in the timeline (she’s the last in Sage’s volume) because I wanted to read Black Venus (1986) during October. I’ve read Shadow Dance and The Magic Toyshop, as well as the stories in Bloody Chamber, but all long ago. In between, I’d forgotten how vivid and over-the-top Carter’s style is. You know how non-fiction readers say that they often reread paragraphs in their reading? I have to do that with Carter’s fiction. And I can’t explain why it doesn’t feel like too much, but somehow it feels just right for her stories. Black Venus does for myth and legend and historical figures what Bloody Chamber does for fairy tales.

“Night comes in on feet of fur and marvellous clouds drift past the windows, those spectral clouds of the night sky that are uncannily visible when no light is there.”

The only writer new-to-me in this project was Christine Brooke-Rose (although I only read my first de Beauvoir a couple of years ago) so I was extra curious about her and ordered Next (1998). (Remake was my target, as it’s autobiographical, but it being unavailable, Next’s focus on a few characters in a London neighbourhood appealed.)

Brooke-Rose arranges words on the first page so that they are in the shape of a building, and it’s clear that we are supposed to sense structure and a foundation but, really, we spend most of our time unmoored, in people’s thoughts and deciphering dialogue.

Nao.
Nao wha’?
She ain’ a pros-prostituta.
Weuw yer’d be’’er gao ter the police stiytion an tell em.
The pleece stiytion? Is I’ far? Ah go’’er ge’ back aome to ge’.
No’ far. Up the Byswa’er Raoad ter Nottinkiuw, turn rah, then fowrk immej ut left, yet knaow wha’ a fowrk is? He gestures with his left hand. Ten mini’s wauwk.

Somehow, though, this didn’t leave me feeling as uncertain as either Barnes or Bowles—the characterisation is solid and I steadily read twenty-pages or so in a sitting until it was finished, my interest intact.

Lorna Sage’s essays themselves were fabulous; one could certainly enjoy them without pausing to read their subjects’ books (as I did myself, years ago).

But I loved making the collection into a project. Loved it so much that I was sorry to realise it was coming to an end.

So I’ve chosen six more women writers to read and reread this year: Julia Alvarez, Alexis Wright, Annie Ernaux, Olga Tokarczuk, Gish Jen, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Plus more Christina Stead (whose work I enjoy now, after only five books of warming up to her). I’ll follow the same pattern, and read a book or two of theirs in one month, and then some essays/articles about their work in the next month, through the year.

Have you read any of these? Or, maybe one of my 2026 targets?