Louise Brown

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them - and for my daughters, too.

a raped girl is bad for the family: it shows that they can__ protect their women; that they have little social standing; and that they__e not respectable. It__ worse for the victim because once a woman, or a girl__r a boy__s known as the target of a rape she becomes so despised, so shamed, so worthless that she turns into public property. No one is raped only once.

Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week.