A Short History of Women

It's 1914, and the war is stirring uneasily in Britain when Dorothy Trevor Townsend takes it upon herself to give her all for the women's suffrage movement--literally: she goes on a hunger strike that ultimately takes her life.

Such is the premise of Kate Walbert's recent novel, A Short History of Women.

What brought Dorothy to this point, how the aftermath filters down into generations of descendants, and how the women who come after her deal in their own way with the issue of being female, makes up this powerful book.

Walbert is an amazing writer. I wasn't sure if a new book could even match the beauty of her last one, Our Kind. But A Short History of Women matches, and maybe even surpasses, her previous work. The book's starting point is shown by Dorothy's daughter, Evelyn, who will be separated from her brother after her mother's death, the two of them sent to separate parts of the world to be raised by strangers. But Evelyn's niece (also named Dorothy) shows the spirit of her grandmother, both politically (she trespasses onto military bases to photograph coffins carrying soldiers killed in Iraq) and in her own struggle to find her way as a woman, a struggle complicated by her own two daughters and their expectations of themselves and each other.

In less capable hands, this could be a hot mess of one-dimensional preachiness, but Walbert never lets the politics and history override the characters. The events of 9/11 make an appearance, but through the eyes of Dorothy's great-granddaughter Liz, who finds her way blindly as a parent of a young child in a post-terrorist home city.

The story is told primarily by Dorothy herself; Evelyn, Dorothy's daughter; Dorothy, the granddaughter and Evelyn's niece; and the latter Dorothy's daughters Liza and Caroline. Although the frequent use of "Dorothy" is occasionally confusing, Walbert does a masterful job of delineating the characters and the times they live in. She's that rare bird, an author who's done her historical homework to create a fully functional, believable world, but without feeling like she has to throw in every interesting tidbit she discovered along the way.

Walbert was a nominee for the National Book Award for Our Kind; surely this book should put her in contention for even more awards.