ABSTRACT
Despite the pressure on novelists and academics alike to tell stories with happy endings and/or hopeful futures, it is useful for politically minded readers – feminists included – to consider instances where this relentless ‘willto-optimism’ is resisted. Rachel, a young single mother in Livi Michael’s Their Angel Reach (1994), is representative of a small, but significant, group of female textual characters in this regard, inasmuch as her future is resolutely without hope. With her short-lived fantasy of running away with new-age traveller, Col, doomed before it has properly begun (she lasts one night in a tent in the pouring rain), hers is a life defined by stasis (spatial and temporal):
[Rachel] looked out at the hazy day and the narrow street, thinking about places she would never see. She wandered over to another window and looked out at her backyard [ … ] Then she thought, what did it matter, whether she saw Col or not? Nothing would happen. Nothing ever happened in Rachel’s life.
