Summer Before the Dark, Doris Lessing

During a summer of solitude, a woman explores various paths of existence she could have taken and lets herself sink into the delirium and anxiety of growing old neglected, before resurfacing, renewed, stripped of all the artifice of a still young woman who until then had only asserted herself according to the desires of others and never her own. In this novel of middle age, Doris Lessing delves vertiginously into the answers to the anxiety that grips women as they emerge from youth, approaching the darkness into which they will be cast by the abandonment of men, turning to others, younger ones. A beautiful reflection on the genre of the "woman-woman," whose community, conjugal, maternal, domestic, social activities respond to the desire of men, when suddenly the man no longer desires her and breaks the balance of an entire life, transforming the angel of the hearth into a cleaning lady.

9782226012814