Books like Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

This marvelous collection of stories about bad girls, wicked women and unsatisfactory wives is designed to promote the female virtues of discontent, sexual disruptiveness and bad manners, and to give a positive role to women who will not put up with the status quo, and to hell with the consequences. Widely ranging in time and place, these subversive tales -- by Grace Paley, Bessie Head, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Jolley, Djuna Barnes, Colette, Angela Carter, Jamaica Kincaid, Ama Ata Aidoo, Jane Bowles and many more -- all have one thing in common: to restore adventuresses and revolutionaries to the rightful position as models for all women, everywhere. Leonora Carrington's debutante swaps places with a hyena who exchanges the cage for the ball -- and goes dressed to kill. Christina Stead's seedy seducer is eventually wrecked by the utterly conventional bride. Some of these stories celebrate toughness and resilience, some of them low cunning: all of them are about not being nice.