The Wrong Kind of Woman: A Novel

Summary

For fans of Meg Wolitzer’s THE WIFE and Chloe Benjamin’s THE IMMORTALISTS, THE WRONG KIND OF WOMAN is an engrossing multi-vocal story of grief, identity, and belonging, set on the campus of an elite all-men’s college in 1970, amid protests against the Vietnam war, calls for co-education, and the rise of the feminist movement.

It’s late 1970 when Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard. Oliver was a history professor at Clarendon, an elite men’s college with just four women on the faculty, and though his widow Virginia initially carried Oliver’s prejudices against these outspoken, never-married women—dubbed The Gang of Four—she begins to depend on them in the wake of his death, and soon she finds herself joining their work to bring the women’s movement—and coeducation—to Clarendon.

Meanwhile, Virginia’s daughter Rebecca is adrift in a world without her dad and no longer recognizes the woman her mother is becoming. On campus, junior Sam Waxman, also reeling from the death of his favorite professor, allows a crush on a female-guest-student-turned-activist to draw him into her radical orbit. Paths converge one fraught night at a Clarendon frat party, where Sam’s entanglement in a badly planned anti-war action threatens Virginia’s newfound identity—and puts much more at stake for Rebecca.

Told through alternating perspectives The Wrong Kind of Woman is a thoughtful, engrossing story of grief and renewal, of shedding old identities and finding new ways to belong, beautifully woven against the backdrop of the rapid changes of the early Seventies.