“Into a Horizon I Will Not Recognize”: Female Identity and Transitional Space Aboard Nair’s Ladies Coupe

The experience of railway travel "is necessary for the birth of unknown landscapes and the strange fables of our private stories."-Michel de Certeau Beginning with its epigraph, Anita Nair's Ladies Coup is a novel about female identity and female space: "Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.But we fight for our rights, we will not let anybody take our breath away from us, and we resist all attempts to prevent us from using our wills."This invocation from Rebecca West, in a passage which also recalls Woolf's A Room of One's Own, evokes the demand for an opening, for the creation of both literal and figural spaces for women within a patriarchal system that has long confined them.It recalls those women persecuted for existing outside of marriage and rejecting motherhood, embraces those women who exist in marginal or potentially dangerous spaces, and exhorts all women to set and pursue their own agendas and to seize the right to live a life of their own choosing.The novel that follows under this banner is similarly about awakenings, about navigating the spaces of and between "in" and "out,"