Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men, 2019. She feels that the other women have abandoned her the way they’ve abandoned their own hopes, refusing to educate or inform her about the past because they don’t believe there will be a future in which that knowledge will matter. Never given a name, she is marked by her bitterness and resentment. The child is the narrator of the novel and her transformation into a teenager is the only reliable timekeeper for the first part of the book. The child, as everyone calls her, seems to be about fifteen now, and she is just one of the many questions that remain: Why put a child in a cage with a group of women who all seem to be about the same age? They suspect it was a mistake never corrected, but I wonder if her difference was the point: to form a splinter, a fracture, to prevent them becoming too unified a whole. None of the women can recall with any specificity too much about their previous lives they talk of a feeling, a flash, a fear and then, perhaps, a long period of being drugged and disoriented to prevent an uprising. There’s no privacy, there’s no dignity and there’s no violence – although the presence of guards with whips and weapons suggest that once there was. Food is provided in a small but seemingly limitless supply.

In this bunker, they speculate that they are underground because there are no windows, but there are no other indicators of time or place. Thirty-nine women are trapped in a cage with one child. Jacqueline Harpman photographed in her home in Brussels, 1996. It was reissued by Penguin Random House UK last year (translated by Ros Schwartz) with an introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, the author of The Water Cure (2018), who writes that the book’s central question is: ‘What does a person become when stripped to the core, raised in isolation?’ Originally published as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men) in 1995, the book first appeared in English in 1997 under the title The Mistress of Silence. Their victories varied: small and ambiguous, revolutionary and hollow.Įventually I got sick of being sent books about women trapped in cults and decided to choose one. Women were oppressed, abused, subject to absurd and punitive control over every aspect of their existence. Sometimes I recognized the leaders of these sects from real-life, though they were less counterparts than tracings of a familiar shape: men who took power from their daughters or wives, discontented by the universe they inherited, and decided to write the rules of their own world.

There was a time when I kept getting sent books about women in cults.

Jacqueline harpman i who have never known men