When She Was Good
When She Was Good is a 1967 novel by Philip Roth. It is Roth's only novel with a female protagonist.
Background
Set in a small town in the American Midwest during the 1940s and '50s, the novel depicts the life of a moralistic young woman, Lucy Nelson.Plot
Below are the events of the novel written in chronological order:Unhappy with her home life due to her alcoholic father, Will's, treatment of her mother, Lucy Nelson starts making plans to convert to Catholicism, thinking that she will find solace in the religion. After she calls the police on her father when witnessing him beating her mother, a local priest, Father Frank, implies that Lucy must repent for betraying her family, prompting her to lose interest in Catholicism.
In her senior year of high school, Lucy befriends a girl named Eleanor Sowerby, and begins dating the girl's cousin, Roy Bassart. Lucy resents Eleanor's mother because she believes that she looks down on her due to her social class, but comes to regret her animosity when Eleanor confides in her about her father, Julian's, infidelity, which she has just discovered. Lucy then comes to the conclusion that she has only been projecting her own insecurities onto Mrs. Sowerby.
Roy pressures Lucy into having sex with him; afterwards, when she is at college, Lucy experiences bouts of dizziness and vomiting, and after a visit to the campus doctor, realizes that Roy has impregnated her. Because she refuses her father's offer to pay for an abortion, Lucy is forced to drop out of college to raise her child. At one point during her pregnancy, Lucy is staying with her family and refuses to let her drunken father into the house. Consequently, he does not return until many years have passed, although it is revealed that he and his wife have, during his long absence, been corresponding via letters, which enrages Lucy's grandmother, who wants her daughter to divorce her husband and marry a kindly older man.
Lucy ultimately marries Roy and though she loves her child, is unhappy with her immature husband and her role as a housewife, leading to frequent outbursts and eventually a mental breakdown that prompts her husband to leave with their child, who has become afraid of his mother. Lucy, who in the meantime, has been impregnated by Roy once again, drives to her in-laws house and demands that her child be given back to her. After being verbally abused by Roy's uncle, Julian Sowerby, Lucy retaliates by exposing his infidelity, only to find that Irene Sowerby is already aware of his liaisons, and is seemingly indifferent to them. Unsuccessful, Lucy wanders out into the cold and freezes to death. Some time afterwards, Will returns to the Nelson residence after being arrested for theft at a casino that he had taken a job at.