Two Serious Ladies

Inspired by the author's honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943) is the only novel by avant-garde literary star Jane Bowles. A modernist cult-classic - mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny - that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery; jettisoning sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness and liberation. Abandoning her family home, Miss Goering decamps to a dilapidated house on an island, but asceticism yields swiftly to increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. Mrs Copperfield dutifully accompanies her husband on a cruise to Panama, but falls in love with a prostitute and is swallowed up by a seedy world of bars and bordellos. When the two meet again, they are much changed - both have suffered the depredations of their deadbeat odysseys, but have found a new strength too.