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    A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds"
    A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds"
    A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds"
    Ebook35 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535843300
    A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Gina Berriault's "Women in Their Beds" - Gale

      1

      Women in Their Beds

      Gina Berriault

      1996

      Introduction

      Gina Berriault’s short story Women in Their Beds was published in a collection of the same name in 1996, when the author was seventy. This volume of new and selected stories represented a breakthrough for Berriault, who had worked steadily at her craft for forty years but, up to this point, had received little critical attention. Women in Their Beds was widely praised in the press and won a number of prestigious national literary awards. In his effusive review of the collection, Lynell George of the Los Angeles Times Book Review writes, In stories that are part trance, part cinema, Gina Berriault writes about the beds we make and are forced to lie in.

      The title story, set in San Francisco in the late 1960s, describes the experiences of a young actress, Angela Anson, who has a day job as a social worker at the county hospital. She carries out the duty of assigning patients on the women’s ward to beds at other institutions, but otherwise resists her role as a cog in the bureaucracy, identifying strongly with the downtrodden and lonely women on the ward. Meditating on the patients, Angela makes imaginative connections between the destinies that all women share, forming a theory that women are inseparable from their beds. Women in Their Beds has a dreamlike logic that blurs the boundaries between self and other, fact and feeling, drama and reality. The story showcases Berriault’s greatest strengths as a writer: the precise beauty of her language, the vivid comparisons she draws between perception and reality, and the enormous compassion with which she represents her characters.

      Author Biography

      Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, in 1926, the youngest of her Russian-Jewish immigrant parents’ three children. Her father worked as an ad solicitor and a writer for trade magazines. Berriault began to write stories on her father’s typewriter when she was still a child. She was, from a young age, independent and self-motivated. In an interview with Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver in the Literary Review, she describes transcribing passages from great literature when she

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