The L-Shaped Room (novel) is pregnant. The L-Shaped room is the dingy room at the top of the boarding house that Jane retreats to, to wallow in her miseries. Jane narrates the story as we follow her through her pregnancy and her encounters with the other residents of the boarding house, all misfits and outsiders. Jane got pregnant through a bungled sexual encounter losing her virginity to her ex-boyfriend. Her decision to live by herself and have the baby causes her to be seen as little better than the prostitutes who live in the basement of the boarding house. The L-Shaped Room (novel) The
Debut novel writers without established legacies. In the same piece for the "Times," Ayana Mathis describes the debut novel as a "a piece of the writer’s soul in a way that subsequent books can’t ever be", because the novel is necessarily a work of passion and a product of all of their life before that moment. Often an author's first novel will not be as complex stylistically or thematically as subsequent works and often will not feature the author's typical literary characteristics. "Huffington Post"'s Dave Astor attributes these to two forces: first that authors are still learning their own unique style and