"Aggression is ugly in a woman," silently muses Lucia - called "L" in the story - after having thrown a chair at her mother. James Joyce's daughter Lucia emerges as a mind to grapple with in the three-page "Expression Theory," a masterpiece of compression. A story from her first collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, was chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2011, and her talents are no less on display here. Sometimes Bergman accomplishes this in astonishingly few pages. The portraits, often drawn near the end of life or after the possibility of fame had passed, create a sense of each woman and the compromises she faced. Like a literary version of Judy Chicago's installation piece "The Dinner Party," Bergman's book assigns each woman her place at the table. Yet, by the end of Almost Famous Women - and the bout of googling it inspires - each of these women has become unforgettable. And there are writers and dancers and artists, such as the 1920s Left Bank painter Romaine Brooks, whose work inexplicably failed to make a lasting impression. "Joe" Carstairs), a stunt motorcyclist (Hazel Eaton). There are women who pulled off daring physical feats for their time and then faded from view: an aviator (Beryl Markham), a speedboat racer (Standard Oil heiress M.B.
There is the Romantic poet Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter Allegra, dead at age 5 and Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins who were vaudeville and burlesque entertainers in the 1920s and '30s.
Many of those faces, however, may not be familiar. So it's almost inevitable that readers will peruse the fascinating images and their captions first, looking for women they recognize.
$25.Įach of the 13 stories in Shaftsbury writer Megan Mayhew Bergman's engrossing second collection, Almost Famous Women, begins with a photo or painting of the real woman whose life inspired the story. Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman, Scribner, 256 pages.
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