The Aspiring Writer

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The four novellas that make up The Puzzleheaded Girl, first published in 1967, are all portraits of women – although they’re referred to, by the characters that surround them, as girls. The distinction is important, and it’s made most explicitly by two of Stead’s male characters, Martin and George, both American expats living in Paris. They’re talking about Linda, the beautiful, kleptomaniac daughter of one of Martin’s friends, whom George desperately wants to marry, in what would be his fourth such partnership. Martin begins:

‘A woman can’t be, until a girl dies. I don’t mean it indecently. I mean the sprites girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in.’

‘Women!’ said George stormily. ‘No, there is not a dead girl in them. They are just clay. When a girl dies there is nothing. Just an army of aunts and mothers, midwives and charwomen… I see girls without sentiment, but I see how beautiful they are. I cannot marry a woman who is a dead girl. I must marry a living beautiful wonderful girl.’

Yet the drama in this story—the last in the collection, ‘Girl from the Beach’—occurs precisely because Linda refuses the definition that these men seek to impose on her, refuses their expectations, too. She is flighty and impulsive, embarking on spontaneous trips to Spain, to Strasburg, to the French countryside, with other young expats she meets in cafes and bars; she shares a hotel room with a young gay man, pretending they are an engaged couple, to save her money and his reputation simultaneously.

At one point in the novella, Barby, one of George’s ex-wives, asks Linda if she intends to follow through with her engagement, and she answers, ‘I don’t know… I think everybody wants to get rid of the problem. I’m a problem.’ But Barby, older, brasher and clearer-eyed than Linda, responds by pointing out that George is the problem, that ‘he’s got a complex’ and hates American girls, but doesn’t know it. ‘He keeps marrying them to make them into his own little girl,’ she states.

Elizabeth Olsen 

#everyone read this#then read it again