A Short History of Women

Kate Walbert

Apr 2010 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Eliza Foss, Ruth Moore, and Paula Parker

About this audiobook

The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries, and her granddaughter Dorothy Townsend Barrett, who focuses her grief over the loss of her son by repeatedly defying the ban on photographing the bodies of dead soldiers returned to Dover Air Force base from Iraq. The contemporary chapters chronicle Dorothy Barrett's girls, both young professionals embarrassed by their mother's activism and baffled when she leaves their father after fifty years of marriage. Walbert deftly explores the ways in which successive generations of women have attempted to articulate what the nineteenth century called “the woman question.” Her novel is a moving reflection on the tides of history, and how the lives of our great-grandmothers resonate in our own.

About the author

Kate Walbert has published fiction and articles in the Paris Review, DoubleTake, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, she is the author of "Where She Went," a short story collection. Her most recent novel is called A Short History of Women. Walbert teaches writing at Yale University and lives in New York City and Branford, Connecticut.