Abstract

This novella deals with changes in the lives and social expectations of men and women in the last decades of the 20th century. Geraldine Taylor, a young woman born just after the end of World War II, grows up in Toronto. Her widowed mother, Gwen, is outwardly rather Bohemian in style, but her rebellious daughter considers her a retrograde example of female subservience to received ideas. The time of the novella is in two parts; the first sketches Geraldine's childhood and then moves to a more expansive view of her life as a young woman in the year 1966. She is determined to live an unconventional life, including love, work, independence and children, but without legal marriage, which she sees as bondage. The second part of the novella begins twelve years later; Geraldine is now a scholar working on a dissertation about the novels of George Gissing. She has compromised with her earlier ideas and has married. She wants to have children, but her husband, an actor, refuses to consider the idea, protesting that it was never part of his idea of marriage. Ultimately their marriage ends and she becomes pregnant from a brief encounter with an old friend. She has decided that single parenthood is better than any of the other lives open to her. In this way a life that began with perhaps unrealistic hopes settles into a form of qualified happiness.