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canadiantiquarian's review
4.0
It looks like another old, ‘40s pulp novel with its boast that “every woman has a secret life.” But instead of reductively teasing scandal, this line is a hint at the fascinating mix of authorial yearning and feminism that fuel this otherwise straightforward romantic journey.
It’s plot is straightforward: A beautiful and mysterious city woman (Leslie Forkner) decides to spend some time in a small town, which incites drama among the town busybodies, and romantic lust among the town’s most eligible bachelors. As she tries to fit in, toeing the line between the young and boisterous and the older and proper, she finds herself mixed up in ongoing town affairs and the drama wreaked by the town’s lone doctor, a lascivious and dangerous drunk named Dr. French.
A Certain Doctor French is a literary middle finger at Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author because in Seifert’s work, the author and the writing are inextricably related.
This is a woman who went to medical school until she had to drop out because she was denied degree candidacy. She embraced becoming a wife and mother, but never forgot her medical passions. Her bibliography is an endless list of medically themed romances, many of which are about women struggling to be accepted as doctors. What she couldn’t explore in real life she explored on the page, not in fantasy, but in a more palpable reality that might have been her life under different circumstances.
This novel — and Seifert’s life — reveal the more intimate, everyday manifestation of mid-20th century feminism — dreaming of equal opportunity while embracing the traditional roles of wife and mother that were available to them. A Certain Doctor French is a simple story that reveals many layers of highs and lows — from the bittersweet yearnings of a female author shackled by the sexism of her time, to the joys of wish fulfillment, to the passions of love, to the fascinating (and heartbreaking) inner desires of our own maternal ancestors.
It’s plot is straightforward: A beautiful and mysterious city woman (Leslie Forkner) decides to spend some time in a small town, which incites drama among the town busybodies, and romantic lust among the town’s most eligible bachelors. As she tries to fit in, toeing the line between the young and boisterous and the older and proper, she finds herself mixed up in ongoing town affairs and the drama wreaked by the town’s lone doctor, a lascivious and dangerous drunk named Dr. French.
A Certain Doctor French is a literary middle finger at Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author because in Seifert’s work, the author and the writing are inextricably related.
This is a woman who went to medical school until she had to drop out because she was denied degree candidacy. She embraced becoming a wife and mother, but never forgot her medical passions. Her bibliography is an endless list of medically themed romances, many of which are about women struggling to be accepted as doctors. What she couldn’t explore in real life she explored on the page, not in fantasy, but in a more palpable reality that might have been her life under different circumstances.
This novel — and Seifert’s life — reveal the more intimate, everyday manifestation of mid-20th century feminism — dreaming of equal opportunity while embracing the traditional roles of wife and mother that were available to them. A Certain Doctor French is a simple story that reveals many layers of highs and lows — from the bittersweet yearnings of a female author shackled by the sexism of her time, to the joys of wish fulfillment, to the passions of love, to the fascinating (and heartbreaking) inner desires of our own maternal ancestors.