Madeleine Gray

Jennifer Down’s second novel, Bodies of Light, is about Maggie, a child who is not told the truth, and so spends her life attempting to attach herself to things and people that seem true.

It is like an inverted and far more complicated version of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle (in which two men bond over their rivalry for a female’s affection). What I keep seeing is variations on this: two young women, both of them queer or queer-adjacent, intensely connected and wavering between the platonic and the erotic; and then the added complication of an older straight man, with whom one of the women sleeps.

This image of a woman observed in public, her distraction a sign that she is somewhere else, too, is one that arises again and again in texts that have women contemplate the minds of other women.

Both George-Allen and Lee are describing their experiences of realisation, of revelation, of feminist wonderment: that the way our culture has been built relies on the systemic mistrust of women.