But my development stopped there: I started to get hair under my arms and on my pubes, my breasts grew a little, and then everything came to a halt.

“The others had been adult for a long time whereas I appeared to be prepubescent. Perhaps this is partly because she has, in other ways, been prevented from becoming a woman. The narrator is different from the other woman not only because she is the youngest (in fact they speculate that she is “almost certainly here by accident”) but because she retains a more active mind. There is a vague sense of some catastrophe which has led to their imprisonment but they “don’t even know if there was a war,” or how they arrived at the bunker in the first place even their initial time in the bunker is described as “the hazy period in the early days of our captivity.” Their time in the bunker is regulated by guards who use whips to control the behaviour of the women – who are now so institutionalised that they are rarely subject to any violence – enforcing such rules as “we weren’t permitted to touch one another.” “No one has the slightest idea what’s behind all this,” the narrator is told by one of the older women. The novel is narrated by the youngest of a group of forty woman incarcerated in a bunker for reasons none of them understand. Yet, though I Who Have Never Known Men is clearly open to a feminist reading, the questions it raises reverberate even wider, forcing the reader to ask what it means to be human. It has now been reissued with a new introduction by Sophie Macintosh, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the growing feminist dystopia market. Jacqueline Harpman was a Belgian author who wrote numerous novels between 19, only two of which have been translated into English: Orlando, which won the Prix Medicis in 1996, and I Who Have Never Known Men, published one year earlier, and translated by Ros Schwartz under the title The Mistress of Silence for Harvill Press in 1997.

I who never known men