Next week, on BBC Women’s Hour, the drama is an adaptation of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, published some thirty years ago. The page includes commentaries from women as to the impact it made on their lives. It did not much impress me, at nineteen or so; I found it, in fact, dreary, though having just discovered feminism I was reading my way through the contemporary feminist canon, plus any rediscovered artists brought to my attention (Rebecca Harding Davis and ES Phelps come to mind). I preferred Marge Piercy’s Small Changes. If I ever were to meet Marge Piercy, I would be hard put to resist asking “What happened to Myriam Berg?” She’s one of the two protagonists, a brilliant computer scientist, a big, extroverted, warm-hearted, needy woman, who both delights in and is exposed by her strong sexuality. She bolts from a mentor’s callous depiction of her as a courtesan into marriage, and from the [cref stealing-fire jealousy of her professional colleagues] into motherhood. At the end of the book she is coaxing herself into believing in herself and her marriage, unaware that her husband – or at least his mistress – has quite another agenda. As a reader who has come to know her, you fear for her. She has given of herself completely to the marriage, desperate to believe in herself as a good woman. Her steps to reestablish her independent self have been shy ones, unlike those of Beth, the other main character, who starts the book as a very young working-class bride and ends it as a lesbian activist living underground with her lover and her sons. Myriam’s ties to her friends have weakened under her husband’s disapproval and her perspective is intensely and painfully personal; she lacks the political and personal connections that sustain Beth. She’s a grand, full, flawed character, and her husband’s departure will be a wound she won’t easily recover from.