The L-Shaped Room Academy Award for Best Actress. A 27-year-old French woman, Jane Fosset (Caron), arrives alone at a run down boarding house in Notting Hill, London, moving into an L-shaped room. Beautiful but withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house, each a social outsider in his or her own way, including a gay black guitar player. Jane is pregnant and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion
The Women's Room was a turning point for feminist fiction. While non-fiction works, such as "The Feminine Mystique", were helping to recruit feminists, feminist fiction was still not widely read and was considered reading for only "hardcore" feminists. French's "The Women's Room" changed that, as shown by its wide reception and "New York Times" bestseller ranking.{9) The Women's Room The Women's Room is the debut novel by American feminist author Marilyn French, published in 1977. It launched French as a major participant in the Feminist Movement and, while French states it is not autobiographical, the book reflects many autobiographical elements. For example, French,