Word: kates
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...statuesque student was soon playing suitably outsized roles: Lysistrata, Clytemnestra, Kate the shrew...
...Fever. Kate Brown and the reader, accordingly, must face the shock of age, the loss of beauty, with dramatic speed. And if that means that the plot must groan like a Paris elevator, or the prose sometimes has to scuff along in rundown slippers and an old dressing gown, Doris Lessing has never been one to take the cosmetics of fiction seriously...
...Kate's family flees for the summer. Kate gets a job-first as a translator, then as a coordinator of international foundation programs. (She discovers that running a foundation is very like running a family.) Yes, Kate also has an affair, bravely trying not to be maternal about the poor, charming young man who drags her off to unsanitary Spain. There she gets fever, makes it back to a London hotel, descends into darkness for some weeks. When she awakes-hair no longer dyed, all her shape gone-she looks like a 140-year-old woman just escaped from...
Caring. For a pretty woman, matrimony puts the highest sort of premium on that view, and the book, naturally, has some harsh words about what even a good marriage does to women. Are there any alternatives? Kate wonders. Probably not, Doris Lessing decides, at least for those women who seem to be born (as well as ingrained) with a sense of caring. Kate is intrigued and provoked, though, by a neighbor -either a mutant monster or the Woman of the Future-who seems to have no sense of responsibility and whose children still seem to have turned out well enough...
...while she shares quarters with a young girl, also a middle-class escapee, who subsists entirely on baby food. Kate has a recurring Jungian dream about a long, cold struggle to carry a wounded seal to water and so save its life. Eventually she goes home, for the first time since her marriage more concerned about herself than about her body or her children. As a small emblem of independence she wears her gray hair untinted. "The light that is the desire to please had gone...