Ella Price's Journal: A Novel

A pioneer novel of women's consciousness-raising, this quietly powerful narrative traces the journey of a women rebeliing, searching, and gradually coming to know herself, for the first time in her life, at the age of thirty-five. The novel begins on the first day of class at a Bay Area community college, and unfolds as a series of entries in the diary the title character has been instructed to keep as an assignment for her English class. Ella Price is a suburban housewife with a reliable, good-natured husband, a teenaged daughter, and a typical working-class life. Yet she is plagued by fears she cannot name; by a sense of being somehow a "freak" in her comfortable, predictable world; and by a gnawing discontent. For her, deciding to begin college at the age of thirty-five is an act of defiance and courage; for her husband, it is a whim to be temporarily indulged. But Ella's exposure to a new world of books and ideas-and to the self-revelatory process of journal writing-has consequences that even she could not have imagined. As her growing consciousness begins to shake the foundations of her life, she becomes for the first time engaged in the political tumult of the 1960s-and also in a passionate, doomed affair with her married English professor. She tries to seek refuge in the security of her home, where her husband is ready to "take care of her" agian. But eventually she must come to the realization that she is irrevocably changed-and that to be true to herself, she must make painful choices.