Essex Girls
For Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
'Not all Essex girls are party girls. They can be sages, martyrs, leaders. In her neat and provocative little book, Sarah Perry celebrates their courage and vivacity.' Hilary Mantel
A defence and celebration of the Essex Girl by the best-selling author of The Essex Serpent
Essex Girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient. They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an accent irritating to the ruling classes. Their bodies are hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar. They are given to intricate and voluble squabbling. They do not apologise for any of this. And why should they?
In this exhilarating feminist defence of the Essex girl, Sarah Perry re-examines her relationship with her much maligned home county. She summons its most unquiet spirits, from Protestant martyr Rose Allin to the indomitable Abolitionist Anne Knight, sitting them alongside Audre Lorde, Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau, and showing us that the Essex girl is not bound by geography. She is a type, representing a very particular kind of female agency, and a very particular kind of disdain: she contains a multitude of women, and it is time to celebrate them.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From the author: “We all know—in the UK, at any rate—what people make of Essex girls. And I realised that I had tried to distance myself from the idea of the Essex girl, because I thought it was shameful and I didn’t want to be seen as being sexually promiscuous or vulgar [Perry was born in Chelmsford, Essex]. Then, I suddenly had this blinding realisation that, in wanting to distance myself from the idea of the Essex girl, I had myself become a misogynist and a class snob. I’m not from a well-to-do background; I’m from an odd, small, religious house. So, why was it so important for me to distance myself from a working-class trope? What if it’s OK to be loud? What if it’s OK to be vulgar and to wear high heels? Why was I going such a long way to distance myself from it? And why are those things despised in women? It’s because they’re taking up space. And why is that a problem? Well, it’s because actually, if you let women be loud and take up space in all sorts of ways, they might start demanding some stuff that society doesn’t want to give them. So, I decided it would be fun to appropriate the idea of the Essex girl and ask, ‘What if all of those things are great?’ And what if that enabled people like Rose Allen, Harriet Martineau, and Emily Hobhouse to be the women they were? So, it was self-expiation. I realised that I had erred, mea culpa, and that I wanted to compensate. During the pandemic, I couldn’t really write fiction—like lots of people, I lost that urge—so I was really relieved that I had something to do.”
