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Mar 24, 2025
“One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful,” wrote Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary, his seminal novel of marriage and desire, “and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
Throughout literary history countless writers, from Flaubert, to Jean Rhys, to Nora Ephron, have written characters who heeded this advice — navigating the ignominy of their societies, and seeking out their own desires amidst various kinds of marital catastrophe — but perhaps never more so than in contemporary literature. Join our panel of writers, whose recently published, widely celebrated novels, explore the lives of women who endeavor to feel what is great and beautiful, and refuse to accept convention.
Their discussion will take place alongside readings from the novels that inspired these modern masterpieces, including Ursula Parrott’s newly rediscovered Ex-Wife, as we consider the novels that have reshaped our understanding of love, power, and marriage.
“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him,” Elena Ferrante writes in Days of Abandonment, her novel of marital catastrophe, “when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”
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