A young woman makes a precarious living among feckless men, crime, and poverty in this best-selling 1960s novel of friendship, sex, and the exhilaration of self-invention
Joy is twenty-one when she has her first kid, and twenty-two when her husband Tom is arrested for stealing a car. Tom is a thief in the way other husbands are plumbers, mechanics, or mailmen; the couple is perpetually broke, except when Tom comes home and pours money on the bed, and then Joy goes on shopping binges and pushes baby Jonny around in a posh pram. But Joy knows it's not going to last: Joy may be a dreamer, but she's also a realist.
Poor Cow, the first novel by Nell Dunn, was trailed by controversy upon its release, in 1967, for its portrayal of impoverished young people making a gutless living in London's East End. The men are idle, drunk, and watch too much television; the women wear cheap, plastic clothing and too much perfume. Joy wants to live out the liberated ideas that would come to define the 1960s; she wants sex, money, beautiful clothes, excitement, and a life that feels unmistakably her own. Joy's circumstances may be destitute, even desperate, but she insists on imagining something more.
Frank, funny, and profane, Poor Cow remains a landmark of feminist fiction, and Joy one of the first truly liberated heroines of postwar fiction.