The Condition
Standalone literary novella
A woman facing an impeccable marriage proposal refuses not through rebellion, but through precision. Told through letters and silences, The Condition is a novella about women made legible for containment, and the quiet power of choosing alignment over approval.
At a glance
Draft in revision, 7,270 wordsBook jacket description
The Condition is a literary novella told through letters, interior passages, and quiet third person observation. It follows two women, Nicollette and Genevieve, whose correspondence becomes a shared language of recognition inside societies that reward female compliance and punish precision.
Nicollette lives in a household where marriage is treated as inevitability and proof of worth. Intelligent, observant, and increasingly restless, she writes to Genevieve about a loneliness that cannot be named without consequence. Their letters expose the machinery beneath polite life, the way women are positioned, assessed, and slowly edited into acceptable shapes.
When Nicollette is introduced to Étienne, a man whose stability is praised as virtue, the offer of marriage arrives not as romance but as arrangement. Through careful questioning rather than open refusal, she tests the edges of what is expected. Her exactness unsettles the household, and the room recalibrates around her.
Genevieve reveals her own history of choosing safety over alignment, and the cost that followed. She warns Nicollette not of scandal, but of relief, the dangerous ease that comes when a woman relinquishes herself quietly.
As Nicollette delays without defiance and insists on thinking rather than agreeing, silence replaces reassurance. When movement finally comes, it is unannounced. Nicollette leaves without explanation, choosing accuracy over approval. The novella closes in that irreversible knowledge, not comfort, but clarity.
Plot summary
Nicollette and Genevieve exchange letters that become a private instrument of recognition. In a culture that rewards manageability, Nicollette’s careful language reads as refusal. When the household offers her an impeccable marriage as solution, she answers with precision rather than compliance, and the social air turns watchful.
Genevieve, older and seemingly settled, confesses what it cost to choose safety. She does not warn Nicollette about drama. She warns her about relief, because relief is how the cage closes without noise.
Nicollette’s resistance is not loud. It is the stubborn act of staying exact. When she leaves, she does not leave a speech behind. She leaves a gap, and the gap becomes the proof.
Selected excerpt
working draft excerptMy dearest sister,
Have you ever had a lonely heart. I know you have, and I am sure many of us do, though we dress it up in lace and laughter and pretend it is only a mood that will pass.
I am writing to you from the little room that looks out upon the yard, the bare limbs of winter trees, and the long dull hush that settles over this house when the day has finished judging me. The floorboards are old and honest. The fireplace is brick, blackened by years of duty. The flame gives a brave, warm light, and I hold my hands near it as though heat might explain the question that has been living in my chest.
I have been thinking about love. Not the neat love that comes with a ring and a suitable surname. Not the love that is traded for safety, or traded for silence. I mean the love that makes a person feel awake. The kind that presses a pulse into the day and makes the hours worth keeping. The kind that sharpens the eye, that puts color back into the world, that turns the mind into a bright blade instead of a dull utensil used for stirring ordinary soup.
Here, they speak of marriage as though it is the final proof of a woman’s value. They speak of men as though they are weather, inevitable, and it is our task to dress accordingly. They speak of duty and comfort and reputation, and the conversation is always the same, only the names change. It is an endless parade of careers, promotions, properties, and the small self admiration that men polish like silver.
They bore me to tears, Genevieve. I listen. I nod. I smile at the right times. And inside I feel something in me slipping away. Not my youth, not my beauty, not those things they always threaten us with. Something rarer. The part of me that wants to learn, to roam, to be startled, to be stirred. The part of me that remembers the taste of air before the world decided what my life should be.
Visual narrative slice