(Un)Told Stories and Women Coming into Their Own: Women’s Experience in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other

Abstract

Frustrated by the lack of visibility of black and mixed-race female protagonists in contemporary British literature, Bernardine Evaristo, a British author of Nigerian, Irish, and German descent, set out to write Girl, Woman, Other (2019), a polyphonic novel centred on twelve female protagonists.
The narratives of women from diverse backgrounds, including age, origin, sexuality, and class, are intricately interwoven throughout the novel. The paper examines how Evaristo portrays female experience in contemporary Britain and recent British history, emphasising the intersections of public and private spheres while specifically addressing issues related to the mixed-race and hybrid identities of her female protagonists. It is argued that Evaristo voices stories and histories of women that have been traditionally marginalised and makes them part of national/British history. Older
protagonists are here analysed against the backdrop of racism and the migration processes and their influence on twentieth-century British society, whereas younger generations are perceived in the context of multi-ethnic Britain and multiple facets of contemporary urban multiculturalism.