A Soft-looking, Middle-aged Woman

She is a soft-looking, middle-aged woman,
whose bust and stomach are always holding a get-together.

In the summer of 1982, while enrolled in a graduate seminar in contemporary women’s fiction, I happened across the above sentence. I was delighted. The description was so right. I didn’t have to memorize it. The image it evoked was vivid enough that the words, along with the author’s name, stayed with me.

Today I finally hunted it down: “The Pleading Woman,” in The Eatonville Anthology, by Zora Neale Hurston

“Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou.^[3] The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays.” — Wikipedia

Hurston’s unpublished works are still being released.

The Life of Herod the Great: A Novel came out in January 2025:

“A never before published novel from beloved author Zora Neale Hurston, revealing the historical Herod the Great—not the villain the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of valor and vision.”

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Image of Zora Neale Hurston by Carl van Vechten via Wikipedia