In 2015, a panel at New York's Museum of Arts and Design took up a question that sounds almost quaint written down: do we need exhibitions just for women? Writing in The New York Review of Books under the old French banner la querelle des femmes , one of the panelists — the youngest in the room — recalls that most participants agreed we did, and recalls just as clearly what sat underneath the agreement: a worry about ghettoization, and a weariness at having this same conversation many times before.
That weariness is worth listening to. It is the sound an argument makes when it hasn't finished. And this week, the literary world was full of that sound.
In The Guardian , Anne Enright celebrates Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground — a novel about a woman who abandons her children in search of her self — as thrillingly original half a century after it appeared. Enright places it inside what she calls a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who leave not just their husbands but the children they have made.