I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

‘As if she did not realise that for me, nothing was ordinary, since nothing had happened to me’.

She may not have the learned behaviours of dances and marriages, but even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage.

if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear, or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.’