At The Toast, Caitlin Keefe Moran writes about the difficult women in the long-forgotten work of Nancy Hale:
The Prodigal Women, now sadly out of print, is a strange, giant, wonderful book, full of desperate, sad, sometimes wicked, sometimes pitiable, women. Gillian Flynn wrote of her novel Sharp Objects, “Isn’t it time to acknowledge the ugly side? I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books.” Gillian, let me present to you Nancy Hale’s Leda March. Leda is deliciously unlikeable. She is described as “frantic with self-consciousness and envy and desire”; she exclusively “hated people, or envied them, or scorned them.” She schemes for social power, she carries on affairs with the husbands of her friends, and above all she feels no shame. Leda is cold, cold, cold.
