Rochester end up in the attic? This 1966 postcolonial novel provides the backstory from “Bertha’s” perspective (though her name is actually Antoinette, despite what her husband calls her). Here’s something any Jane Eyre reader should want to know: how did Mrs. And the central mysteries of this novel-who is Beloved? What happened to her? And what has Sethe been repressing?-prove an incredibly propulsive fuse for the heartbreaking story.

The novel is full of women with righteous rage, from Sethe to Beloved herself.

The fury of the past refuses to stay suppressed in Toni Morrison’s classic, about former slaves now dealing with a seriously angry ghost. Then watch what happens as that thwarted ambition turns to rage, then despair ultimately, Lady Macbeth has nowhere left to put these emotions and must turn them in on herself.

(Although, if you were watching from a Tudor court, you probably thought it was.) Instead, turn to Lady Macbeth for an incredible depiction of female ambition at a time when it was incredibly unwelcome. But things didn’t end so great for her, did they? Her husband basically abuses the anger right out of her, leading to a conclusion that hardly seems “comic” today. Okay, so Shakespeare’s original mad woman was probably Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. Historically, women have been meant to uphold the social order, not rage against it (you could argue that in some segments of society, that’s still the case). Because, historically, women have not been meant to feel anger. So now, when collecting a group of thrillers about women’s rage, I quickly came to a realization: for me, all stories featuring women’s rage are thrillers. And as I let them follow this fury to its logical endpoint, the novel turned into something very different from what I had planned. But the more I returned to my own ballet days, and the more I thought about the structures-both social and artistic-that surrounded my characters, the more I realized that they were actually furious. When I started writing The Ballerinas, I wanted to write an updated version of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, an ode to female friendships. My definition ( A larger-than-life character in a compelling situation, where their own desires lead to increasingly escalating consequences and ultimately show the extremes of human behavior) was looser than some of my fellow author’s.īecause here’s the thing: I’d ended up writing a thriller entirely by accident. In a recent interview, I-along with six other debut authors-had to define the genre. That is, unless we reconsider what a thriller is in the first place.

Rage becomes her review