What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance? Colette, under her Gallic Afro? Sappho, about whom almost nothing is known? ‘I famish/and I pine,’ she says in my handy desk translation. And so did we! Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led?
So the search for the impossible man went on.