Four Bare Legs In A Bed

by Helen Simpson

A collection of witty short stories addresses women's issues from the perpective of women throughout history, from four struggling sisters in fourth-century Lycia, to the woes of a contemporary insomniac secretary. A first collection.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, British Literature

183 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Helen Simpson is an English novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1959 in Bristol, in the West of England, and went to a girls' school. She worked at Vogue for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing. Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award while her book Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. (In particular, the mystery author Helen de Guerry Simpson is a different author.)

In 1993, she was selected as one of Granta's top 20 novelists under the age of 40.

In 2009, she donated the short story The Tipping Point to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simpson won the inaugural Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for this in 1991. Her protagonists are women disillusioned with the norms of marriage and motherhood. They ditch their safe relationships, or carry on brazen affairs; they fear pregnancy, or seek it out on their own terms. The feminist messages are never strident because they are couched in such brisk, tongue-in-cheek narratives. For instance, in “Christmas Jezebels” three sisters in 4th-century Lycia cleverly resist their father’s attempts to press them into prostitution and are saved by the bishop’s financial intervention; in “Escape Clauses” a middle-aged woman faces the death penalty for her supposed crimes of gardening naked and picnicking on private property, while her rapist gets just three months in prison because she was “asking for it.” (Nearly three decades on, it’s still so timely it hurts.)

I loved “The Bed,” a kind of fairy tale about a luxurious new bed solving all of a woman’s problems; “What Are Neighbours For,” in which each woman cattily plans what she can get out of the others; “Labour,” a brief five-act play set in a hospital delivery room; and “Zoë and the Pedagogues,” about a woman learning to drive who has two very different teachers (perhaps inevitably, this recalled for me Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors). “An Interesting Condition,” which takes place in an antenatal class, is like Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Bad Latch,” while multiple stories reminded me of Shena Mackay, especially “Send One Up for Me,” about a woman tiptoeing around her boarding house and trying not to anger the landlady.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Baz · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know you’re crushing hard on a writer when you read everything you can about them online. She’s one of the few authors to have built a reputation exclusively on short stories, and this pleased William Trevor: She’s a “marvelous short-story writer. And it is particularly pleasing for me as a short-story writer to know that her talent is devoted to this particular form.”

A couple of articles pointed out the interesting fact of the publication timeline of her collections: Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005), In-Flight Entertainment (2010) & her most recent, Cockfosters (2015). There are exactly five years between them, & the ages of most of the characters mirror Simpson’s own. She’s basically documenting the contemporary lives of women at various stages. This got me excited & though I’d already decided I was going to read everything she’s written, it’s intensified my interest in her perspective. I read with relish the stories in this debut collection about the lives of young women lamenting & questioning their newfound commitments, their new or possible marriages and the expectation to rear children, & what it all means to their individuality. She works on a small canvas, writing miniatures about the real, everyday problems women face. In Hey Yeah Right Get a Life characters are fuming with righteous & exhausted anger about the unjust sexist nature of parenthood & marriage. It was celebrated at the time for giving voice to the messiness, mixed feelings & weight that many have felt. It struck me because I notice even today women who are reluctant to speak truthfully & choose to present things in a pleasant, appealing light. I guess it speaks to the general burden most people feel to always look good in front of others. Anyway, my point is that it was great to go back ten years from that book to this book, where these young characters already feel the foreboding of what’s to come. It’d almost be too grim to bear if it weren’t for the humour, wit & most gorgeous & delightful prose ever.

[Stik · Rating 3 out of 5]

“She noticed that she really could not care less. Idly intrigued, she summoned up her father's shade: nothing She considered how it was in the nature of things that the first day of the holidays always came, and the last and how it would be just like that too with other men and with death as well. Nothing was durable. So what, she shrugged.”

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

These short blasts of spiky black humour leave you breathless. The petty-bourgeois milieu often reminded me of VS Pritchett, updated to the 1980s, and the sly social observation of a cruder 20th-century version of Jane Austen, keenly people-watching from a corner of the room.

There are some killer first sentences here.

Mrs Brumfitt crossed the room sideways and at speed, making for the comparative obscurity of the corner chair. She was tree-limbed, with beetling unplucked eyebrows that gave her a false scowl. (how VS Pritchett is that?)

"Think of your cervix as the sleeve of a sweater," said the snake-hipped young midwife.

And other sentences that are pure genius. A character about to read from the Bible:

She sat up straight and formalised her face so that her mouth was stern and her cast-down eyelids gleamed like the backs of teaspoons.

Entertaning, and sometimes a bit depressing given her jaundiced view of male-female relationships. For maximum enjoyment, best taken in small doses.

[Olivia Walsh]

I absolutely loved this collection of short stories.
- Clever explorations of male/female power dynamics but also of female sensuality.
- Interesting observations of internalised misogyny, particularly between generations of older/younger women.
-Overall beautifully creative prose.

My only criticisms would be that there is some slightly dated racial profiling. The book is over 20 years old now so understandable in some ways but as a reader in 2020 these moments do jar.

[Stephen]

It's not every day I find myself reading a freebie in Cosmo. It's not quite what you might expect...

Childbirth, a couple's divergent responses to a new bed, a clergyman's wife's bored flight's of fancy during a sermon... The bed of the title is the springboard for an orgy of originality.

There is bumping and grinding but it's not gratuitous. Each short story is an airy elevation above what I'd first imagined when I realised my ebay copy had once been sellotaped to a magazine that only went to print when it had the perfect cleavage.

Simpson's micro-tales are certainly journalistic in their brevity. A couple of stops on the tube and you could have been transported to a rocky cruise from Bergen or three rebellious daughters in the Ancient Lycean region of modern-day Turkey. It's uneven but never too far off and certainly always short enough. The final story is especially dark and Atwoodian, with a noose-eyed view on the future that again had me recalibrating everything I ever thought but didn't about Cosmo...

[Lauren Herzfeld · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have shed the load of worry I was born with. I shall never do more for money than I have to again.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Simpson is a new author to me, although this, her first collection of short stories was published in 1990, and many of the stories it contains were written in the eighties. As a lover of short stories, I'm not quite sure why it's taken me so long to discover her. Four Bare Legs in a Bed contains fourteen very short stories, all told with wit and sly humour. Ranging in time from the seventeenth century to a dystopian near future, they are unified by a common thread. Each in some way is about relations between men and women, told from the woman's point of view. The final story in the book, Escape Clauses, set in a Kafkaesque legal system in which women are tied up in knots, and easily disposable, is to my mind the best in the book: disturbing, thrilling and all too believable.

[Joanne Parkington · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it .. it was different ... but i've read much better short story books so i'm not so sure of the hype surrounding this one ... there's a standard theme running through all these tales which, as it doesn't serve to link them means that, after the 3rd or 4th tale, you already know whats coming.
Give it a whirl though.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

An invigorating variety of short stories dealing, for the most part, with the slings and arrows that Life inflicts upon girls and women, in a mostly light-hearted manner.
Whit it failed to do, for me, was give the origin of the title - from an early rhyme which I once read and wanted to find again. Plus these felt less incisive than those in 'Cockfosters'

[Lynne · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit dull, really.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another odd book! The title story was funny and quirky and I enjoyed Zoe and the Pedagogues despite the story being way too short but the rest were just way off beam for me.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories about marriage, mostly. Quite depressing but well written and witty.

[Sylvain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad for a book my best friend gave me as a joke.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was ok - not as good as Constitutional!