Adams, Alice | Greg Johnson (essay date 1990)
Greg Johnson (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "Some Recent Herstories," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XLIV, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer, 1990, pp. 278-88.
[In the following excerpt, Johnson commends Adams's depiction of women's relationships—romantic and platonic—in After You've Gone.]
In After You've Gone, Alice Adams' tenth book of fiction, the typical character is an intelligent, career-minded woman whose personal history includes a series of failed relationships with men. Her heroines tend to hold feminist ideals—generally they are self-supporting, intellectually autonomous, and politically liberal—but fail to practice these ideals when choosing and relating to their male partners.
As the title of a recent bestselling self-help book would have it, they're smart women who make foolish choices. (The first clue to their emotional dependency, at times verging on desperation, is in the volume's title, which...
[The entire page is 773 words long]
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