In 1965, a beautiful young woman gassed herself to death in Primrose Hill, north London. Like Sylvia Plath, who died in eerily similar circumstances two years previously just two streets away, she was a writer, and the mother of two small children.
Her name was Hannah Gavron, and she left behind an about-to-be-published manuscript, The Captive Wife. Her young son, just four at the time of his Hannah’s suicide, grew to become the author, Jeremy Gavron.
Searching for the mother who was never talked about as he grew up, Jeremy Gavron discovered letters, diaries, and photos that paint a picture of a brilliant but complex young woman grappling to find an outlet for her creativity, sexuality, and intelligence. His resultant memoir of his mother, A Woman on the Edge of Time, not only documents the too-short life of an extraordinary woman; it is a searching examination of the suffocating constrictions in place on intelligent, ambitious women in the middle of the twentieth century.
Join the How To Academy as Jeremy Gavron sensitively brings to light the experiences of Hannah Gavron and women like her, whose thoughts, actions and struggles in the pre-feminist years of the early 1960s ought never to be hidden, or forgotten.
