In the same vein as Marilyn French’s seminal novel of 1970s Second Wave Feminism, The Women’s Room, Down Among the Women is in turns miserabilist about the plight of women in a changing world and positive in its portrayal of women overcoming the odds stacked against them. Weldon’s heroines deal in rapid succession with divorce, madness, pregnancy in- and outside of marriage, child-rearing, employment, psychotherapy, homosexuality, and much more. Novels such as this, originally published in 1971, were groundbreaking and controversial at the time but are now almost hackneyed. From the many imitators of the aforementioned Women’s Room, to the confessional autobiographies of the 1990s, to the Sex and the City female archetypes of the 2000s, the conflicting pressures on women, while still unresolved, have been dissected endlessly. Because Weldon’s own characters are archetypes, they tend to lack any real depth, with circumstances and characters changing to suit the narrative. Nevertheless Weldon’s biting wit and cut-glass prose allow room for each character to have funny, heart-breaking, and realistic moments amid the cartoonish plot that keep the novel interesting and insightful, helping to set it apart from the imitators as one of the original and best examples of feminist novels.

Emphatically Not Worth Consuming. The only people I can imagine enjoying this are very muddled self-absorbed later middle aged women who have a lot of middle class guilt. The plot rambles, but not with any purpose in mind. I felt no affinity for any of the characters- and indeed the only one you actually know anything about is the narrator, and she’s unbearably irritating. Large portions of the book are devoted to the erections of virtually every man she’s ever seen, from her husband to her grandfather to some guy sitting next to her on a train, while the actual plot (the “gathering” of the title) takes only about 10 pages of the book. I’m all for novels about character exploration and development, but when the only real character is as boring as the one here, the explorations mostly don’t make sense and the development is questionable. Don’t bother.

Really enjoyed this one; I’d read ‘On the Beach’ and loved it, but this is a very different sort of book and I wasn’t sure what to expect. While parts of it are a bit dated (premarital sex is referred to as ‘a fate worse than death’ and the racism is pretty rampant), its vivid depictions of life in the Pacific and Australia in the 1940s and 50s were instructive for someone like me who knows very little about the period/places but mostly entertaining- a nice antidote to ‘Main Street’!

I hated this book, and I remember all my friends reading it when we were 12 and taking it SO seriously. Well it was about as effective as the DARE program, cos half of them have been in rehab by now. And I’m sorry, only a middle aged man would think adolescent girls talk or act like that.

Not gonna lie, it took me FOREVER to get into this. But I hate giving up on a book so I was just going to skim my way through (yah, I know it’s cheating…) and then about half way in I just got really really into it and started appreciating Joyce’s range and style. I still don’t recommend it to absolutely everyone, I definitely had to make the commitment to read it on my own, but I’m still glad I did it and I ended up really enjoying it.