A Good Woman
I was looking for something to read at my great-grandmother's house in France. I didn't have much choice. The library was mostly stocked with encyclopedias and cookbooks, and the few novels were all by different authors. Except for one author whose books I found three, a hit in proportion: Danielle Steel. This one wasn't just a hit in my great-grandmother's library. She wrote 190 books, sold 650 million copies worldwide, and even achieved a Guinness World Record for being on the New York Times bestseller list for 381 consecutive weeks. She even claimed to work 20 to 22 hours a day. She's a machine. So I chose to read the most feminist of the three, because my grandmother had four sisters: A Good Woman.
Annabelle is a rather miserable young girl of the early 1900s. A horrible time for women. Even though she is wealthy (her father was the owner of a successful bank), beautiful (a slender blonde with blond eyes) and intelligent (she has a passion for medicine and volunteers in a hospital in her spare time), she has no future. She is approaching her twenties, and it is already time for her to get married. She prepares for it quietly, and lives her boring middle-class life.
Then, it is the beginning of the catastrophes. It is 1912. She was ill and had to stay at home, but her family boarded the Titanic for New York. Her father and brother died. Her mother escaped, but their lives were destroyed. They both have to mourn for a year, which seriously affects Annabelle's hopes of finding a husband.
Fortunately, she has a suitor. A good one, from the business world too. They are such good friends, like brother and sister, that she doesn't notice that he is courting her.
At the end of his mourning, he declares his "love" for her, and they get married. But they never become more than friends. Two years later, Annabelle is still a virgin. Not that it bothers her that much: her friends all have horrible pregnancies, and some of them lose their lives. She decides to let time take its course, while her mother continues to pressure her to have a child.
Then, another catastrophe. Her husband confesses to her the unmentionable: he is gay. For years, he has had a lover, and he has caught syphilis. He asks for a divorce, so that "she can start her life again". But she doesn't want to, she loves him. So he asks for a divorce, and everyone thinks that Annabelle has committed adultery. The worst shame there is. All her friends disown her. Meanwhile, her mother dies of grief. She is absolutely alone in the world.
—
That's the first part, boring and quite depressing. Unpleasant to read aloud, moreover. I don't know if it's because of the translation, but Danielle Steel obviously didn't have time to revise her texts at length. Her sentences are basic, banal, subject-verb-complement. I finish the first part, a little depressed.
Then, the second half of the book begins, and it accelerates tremendously. Since Annabelle has nothing left, no family, no friends, no husband, she throws herself into her passion: medicine. The Second World War began and she decided to volunteer in a hospital. Very quickly, it is noticed that she is gifted, and she is proposed to continue studying medicine. She did so.
During the war, she is called to the front. Once again, fate takes its toll on her: she is raped by a drunken soldier, who dies soon after. And of course, she gets pregnant.
It's not going to be easy. She gets disowned, raped, betrayed, heartbroken. All the misfortunes that can happen fall on her.
But she is strong. But after all, life is beautiful. Her little one turns out to be an angel fallen from heaven. The mother of the rapist soldier is rich and has a big heart. She becomes a doctor, she starts her own clinic. She becomes happy, totally independent, successful, and respected. And she even meets a nice journalist at the very end, who may finally make her discover love...
As a result, I read this bestseller in two nights. I finished it happy, hopeful and energized, and frankly impressed.
No wonder it became a bestseller.
