Reading Groups

How Should a Woman Be? Three Novels About Women and Freedom with Jennifer Stock

3 Sessions Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT March 27 to May 8, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
3/27, 4/17, 5/8
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Sheila Heti’s delightfully astute novel How Should a Person Be? pursues its title’s question with a winning combination of zest and philosophical gravity: How do any of us actually know how to act in the world?

In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels where female protagonists face confusion surrounding how best to live—and as women, how best to live free from gendered social constraints. We’ll start with a 19th-century novel, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, where the protagonist has to slowly unknit everything she’s learned about “how a woman should be” in order to find—possibly—happiness.

Investigating the ways in which our first protagonist’s transfiguration has been constrained by a male author within the confines of a marriage plot, we’ll swivel to two contemporary and feminist takes on confusion where two women in mid-life furiously interrogate and re-write social scripts in a move towards sexual and creative freedom. All three novels ask serious questions about how a person should be, hinting at both the stakes and the creative possibilities of confusion.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Forster’s A Room with a View

What to expect from this reading group: This group is seminar-style and participant-driven, with some with some initial structure and observations to focus and warm-up our conversations.

Reading List:

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
All Fours by Miranda July

Capacity: 20

Led by

Jennifer Ives Stock

Jennifer Ives Stock

Jennifer Ives Stock is an essayist whose work has appeared in the Iowa Review, the Yale Review, the New England Review, the Georgia Review, Salmagundi, Hotel Amerika, and the Normal School. Her essays “Alice and Jean,” “Lighter than Air” and “Parrot on a Stone Plinth” were awarded Notable distinctions in the Best American Essays of 2019, 2021, and 2023. Her first essay collection was a finalist for the 2024 Yale Nonfiction Prize. She is currently a Lecturer in Writing at Yale.

About this series

Reading Groups

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