Set in what feels like a completely alien world, by Jacquelline Harpman is a dystopian story about forty women confined in what appears to be an underground bunker. They have lived there for years, watched over by male guards, with access to electricity, water, and systems that provide without ever explaining why. These scenes echo forms of cruelty and control that are far from imaginary.
Life continues in this controlled routine until a sudden siren changes everything. Through a small moment of chance, the women manage to escape and step into a world they do not recognise.
Once the women leave their confinement, the story opens into new questions. The focus shifts toward learning how to exist in the outside world, holding onto hope, coping with loss, and figuring out what survival really means. As they move forward, discovery after discovery brings a growing sense of dread, until the possibility emerges that they may be the last humans left on this planet.
This world was like a jigsaw puzzle, I only had a few pieces which didn’t fit together.
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
Throughout it all, the novel balances thoughtful philosophical ideas with moments of quiet tenderness, creating a story that feels both intellectually rich and deeply humane.
How the narrator stands apart from the others is subtle but meaningful. Compared to women who spent their lives working service jobs or raising families, she is the youngest who grows up in the jail. She feels almost as unfamiliar as the world around them. She lacks a clear understanding of what an ordinary human life looks like, and this difference unsettles the group, adding quiet tension to their shared survival.
At a glance, I Who Have Never Known Men may only categorized as female-centred science fiction, though I think that label feels too narrow. Sure the set of the story mirrors women’s lives in a symbolic way. It carries many meanings at once, touching on how society treats women and how their lives are often shaped by invisible boundaries. There is something deeply sad and painfully ironic in that parallel. Then, as the experiences explored here may begin with women, they also speak to life under patriarchy as a whole. Femaleness sits at the heart of the story while also fading into the background at times, woven naturally into the world rather than used as a single defining feature. Figuratively, they feel uncomfortably close to realities, making the setting more like a distorted reflection of our own world.
Harpman places humanity firmly at the center of the novel. As the landscape grows increasingly strange and unsettling, the story never loses sight of its characters as people. Their emotions, fears, and quiet resilience are always present, grounding the reader in something familiar amid the disorientation.
Reading I Who Have Never Known Men feels like joining the characters in their dystopian reality and experiencing their fear, hope, and resilience alongside them. Their emotions feel real and close. It is one of the best books I have read, and I would recommend it without hesitation.
My Favorite Bits
- Admittedly, we were all caught up in the same drama that was so powerful, so all-embracing that I was unaware of anything that wasn’t related to it, but I had come to think that I was different. And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.
- She couldn’t understand why someone would want knowledge that would be of no use to them, and I couldn’t get anything out of her. It was certain that I would die untouched, and I wanted to satisfy my curiosity at least.
- By remaining silent, they were creating a girl who didn’t know and who would regard them as the custodians of a treasure.
- I’d been used to respecting the women’s wishes, especially those of the eldest who had the most authority, but everything had changed because I could no longer see any basis for that authority.
- “You think you have power but you’re like the rest of us, reduced to receiving your share of food from enemy hands and with no means of punishing me if I rebel against you. Seeing as they forbid any authority other than theirs, you can neither beat me nor make me go without.”
- Human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity. (..) And gradually, I began to feel sorry for those women determined to carry on living, pretending they were active and making decisions in the prison where they were locked up for ever, from which death was the only release.
‘What’s the use of talking about it? It won’t make any difference.’
‘There you go again with your stupidity! As if talking only served to make things happen. Talking is existing. Look: they know that, they talk for hours on end about nothing.’
‘But will talking teach us anything about what we’re doing here? You have no more idea than I or any of the rest of us do.’
‘True, but I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea, and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots.’
- It isn’t the menopause that has withered us, it’s despair.
- I no longer felt humiliated by my ignorance, because I’d touched on a knowledge that was too painful to bear.
‘Being beautiful, was that for the men?’
‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’
Author: Jacquelin Harpman
Publication date: 1 January 1995
Number of pages: 184 pages
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