Pages For Her – Sylvia Brownrigg

Pages For Her is not a book I would ordinarily recommend. Maybe because it’s not gay enough, whatever that means. I don’t know. I recommend this book regardless because it was such a beautiful read. And I would even go so far to say that Sylvia Brownrigg wrote a feminist book which would make it good for me.

It’s twenty years later since Pages For You where Flannery and Anne first met and started a sizzling love affair. A lot has happened in these years. Flannery lives with her husband and they have a child together, Willa. Anne has been with Jasper, the man that broke up their affair al those years ago.

The book is in three parts. First part is all Flannery, how her life and work has been and how she ended up with a husband and child. Second part is all Anne, focused more on the last years of her life where she and Jasper broke up. An all women literature event at their old university where it all began, brings them back together after all these years. What will happen when they meet each other again? For it is clear neither woman has forgotten about the other.

So it takes a long time reading before they eventually meet. It’s worth the wait though. Sylvia Brownrigg makes them both so real on their own. You get to know them so much better. It also gives you such an understanding of who and how they became the women they are now. I must confess it was hard to read now and then because of the emotions it invoked in me. I decided though that it was those feelings that made me appreciate this book so much. It made me realize something that I sometimes forget. That there is so much between winning and losing, opinions and reality, choosing yourself over what is expected, getting to love the unexpected. And I was reminded again that ‘love is all’ is still true.