Product Description

'This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don't quite work. It has a childhood at its centre - my childhood, a personal past - and it is about the disruption of that fifties childhood by the one my mother had lived out before me, and the stories she told about it.' Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism. 'Provocative and quite dazzling in its ambitions...Beautifully written, intellectually compelling', says Judith Walkowitz.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76019 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 174 pages

Review
'I read Landscape for a Good Woman, and some things (not all, because this is not a fairy tale) started to fall into place' Kathryn Hughes

About the Author
Carolyn Steedman was born in 1947 and grew up in South London. Her first book, The Tidy House (Virago 1983) was the winner of the 1983 Fawcett Society Book Award. She lives in Leamington Spa and is Professor in the History Department at the University of Warwick

Customer Reviews

Landscape for an Intellectually Breathtaking Experience
Editorial Review from Amazon US by Jesse Larsen (author of 500 Great Books about Women)

Carolyn Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was shaped by her mother's longing: "What she actually wanted were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her... When the world didn't deliver the goods, she held the world to blame." When Carolyn Steedman grows up and begins to look for reflections of her and her mother's lives in history, theory, and literature, she finds that "the tradition of cultural criticism that has employed working-class lives, and their rare expression in literature, has made solid and concrete the absence of psychological individuality - of subjectivity." Through an in-depth comparison of personal experience and prevailing political and social science theory on the psychology and attitudes of working-class people, Landscape for a Good Woman challenges an intellectual tradition that denies "its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis." In this poignantly written and thoroughly researched work, the common theoretical conclusion that the survival struggles of working-class people precludes the time necessary for more genteel "elaboration of relationships" is shot full of delightfully life-affirming holes. --

Customer Reviews from Across the Pond:

Landscape for great writing, April 23, 2007 by C. Robe

As I was comprising a reading list for my graduate students, I was suddenly reminded of Steedman's slim historical-novella-theory book that towers over so many other creative and academic achievements. Steedman offers one of the most nuanced readings of marxism's link with psychoanalysis into an incredibly personal memoir. Beyond categorization, Steedman's work is absolutely essential reading. In particular, she brilliantly highlights the way in which class is effaced within the academy: "I read a woman's book, meet such a woman at a party (a woman now, like me) and think quite deliberately as we talk: we are divided: a hundred years ago I'd have been cleaning your shoes. I know this and you don't."


Looking for the New Look Woman, May 7, 2006 by Marysz (New Jersey, US)

An absorbing memoir of the author's childhood in post WWII London. Steedman's mother was a chronically dissatisfied working-class woman angry about her life of material deprivation. She was, in Steedman's words, part of a "subterranean culture of longing for what one can never have." Her anger extended to her two daughters--she told them, "If it wasn't for you two, I'd be off somewhere else."
Steedman uses fairy tales, psychoanalytic theory and working class biographies to try to make sense of her mother's malaise. Her mother's unmet needs were personified in her desire for enough fabric to sew herself dresses in the fabric-intensive "New Look" style introduced by Dior in 1947--a style that compensated for the deprivations of wartime clothing rations. Naturally, she blamed her daughters for the fact that she didn't have the money. This lead to Steedman having a recurring (and fascinating) childhood dream about a woman in a flowing New Look coat trapped in a revolving door. It's a Hitchcockian dream image, one of visual complexity and psychological truth. Steedman's mother stubbornly resists her daughter's painful attempts to come to terms with her maternal indifference and the odd sense of class rebellion that led her to join the Conservative Party. In the end, Steedman is left going in circles, not unlike the chic woman of her persistent dream. But she creates an unforgettable portrait of her mother, an unknowable woman who yearned for a life of luxury and respectability that defied both political and psychological stereotypes about how poor women "should" behave.

Important contribution to historical discourse..., April 12, 2004 by Justin Bean (Michigan, US)

'Landscape for a Good Woman' marks a turning point in how history is written. In the start of the book, Steedman acknowledges that she is not writing a history for everyone (she even denies that her book is a work of history). Instead, through what she says is an act of 'particularizing', Steedman has demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the individual histories of 'lower class' or 'working class' people and families that are often over looked due to an array of social, economic, political, and psychological confines that dominate discourse in each of these areas.
Whether being read as a feminist critique of male dominated society, a working class critique of upper class dominated society, or a critique of the discipline of history, this book offers a world of information and ideas. It is short and very dense but excellently written. Each sentence is worth rereading as the reader will quickly discover that multiple lessons can be gleamed from each thought Steedman presents.

Through being told from the perspective of Steedman as her mother's daughter, the book demonstrates how the past shapes the present and how the two seemingly separate regions are actually tangled and inseparable. This book is worth every second it takes to read, and the time you'll spend thinking it over well after it has found its place on your shelf.

Fascinating Psychoanalytical Personal History, June 20, 2000 by a Customer

This book tells the story of Carolyn Steedman's childhood and her mother's refusal to mother. Taking as her starting off point three forms of narrative, the fairy tale, the psychoanalytical case study and the Working Class (auto)biography Steedman creates a narrative that is unlike any I have read. It is at time incredibly difficult and engaging. She challenges assumptions of class, especially the relationship between gender and class, throughout the text. Her childhood, and the childhoods she draws from other working class narratives are thrown into relief against Freud and Marxism. At the same time she uses these tools to examine herself and the world she grew up in.