[Review] I Who Have Never Known Men By Jacqueline Harpman

By Sarah Denison

Shortly after the 2024 election, I, like so many other disappointed women, picked up the 2022 reprint edition of I Who Have Never Known Men. Facing another four years of a sexist man in power and his regressive policies, I craved a fictional escape to a world without men. The book first came to my attention on social media. Despite being over 30 years old, it seemed like everyone was talking about it, so I put it on hold at my library and waited. When it finally came in, I started reading and didn’t stop. I had expected a tale similar to other popular feminist writings of its time (Herland, The Matter of Seggri, etc.) that extolled the virtues of womanhood. What I got was so much more.This is a sleeper feminist work of its time that will linger in your mind, not only because of its unresolved mysteries, but also because of what it reveals about humanity.

The novel is the written account of an unnamed narrator known only as "The Child" and relates a disturbing and enigmatic world in which she, and 39 women, are imprisoned in a bunker with silent, round-the-clock guards. No context or background information is provided, leaving the reader as helpless as the characters. They don't know why they were put there, what they are doing there, and what will come next.  They have only vague, painful memories of their abduction and a Pavlovian fear of the sound of the guards’ whips. Were they drugged? Tortured? They will never know for sure.

This mysterious terror subsides when the guards suddenly disappear (without explanation) and all are able to escape. Yet freedom from the bunker poses its own challenges. They find themselves to be alone, the only living people, on what appears to be an alien planet. Survival is now the goal and the bunker holds everything they need. Through their survival, they learn to be content. The narrator, as the youngest, comes to be the sole living person on the planet. She lives out her days wandering, exploring, and searching for answers until she, too, dies, leaving only her narrative behind.

This ambiguous ending may leave some readers unimpressed and frustrated, but the plot of this novel is less about the external dystopian circumstances the narrator finds herself in, and more about her life and growth as a human. It is a Hero’s Journey of the internal variety. Rather than returning to the ordinary world from which she was snatched, she returns to her solitude, only this time with the elixir - knowledge, not of men, but of herself.

Harpman wrote this book while in her sixties, and though it was the francophone author’s first book to be translated into English, she had been writing fiction and nonfiction on the topics of psychoanalysis, myths, architecture, and feminism for decades. It is perhaps worth noting that as a child, Harpman fled with her family to Morocco at the start of the Nazi invasion of Belgium. The senseless imprisonment of the women reflect the stories of those imprisoned in holocaust internment camps. This novel could serve as Harpman’s own Man’s Search for Meaning. 

Originally published in Belgium in 1995 under the title Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes, the first English translation was published in 1997 with the title The Mistress of Silence. Harpman’s book received little attention state-side, selling only a few copies a year. 

This is not the first reprint of a feminist classic to gain popularity. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, another decades-old speculative fiction novel about the repression of women, began to rise in sales post- Trump’s election in 2016 and the release of its Hulu adaptation series in 2017. Written in 1985, when conservatives and the Christian right were gaining political power and threatening women’s reproductive rights, contemporary rReaders felt the relevancy of Atwood’s fictional Gilead.

Due to this rising popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale and other post-apocalyptic feminist works, a reprint of The Mistress of Silence seemed to be a safe bet, though it was never expected to become as popular as it has. After U.S. rights were bought by Transit Press, a new U.S. edition was released in 2022 under the title I Who Have Never Known Men. Sales, at first, were modest, but by 2024, it was selling 100,000 copies a year. Trump’s second term run and election rekindled fears about the future of women’s rights, spurring readers to again seek solace in literature from women who have come before.

However, it would be erroneous to assume that I Who Have Never Known Men is only a novel about women and women’s rights. The Child’s story, as the novel develops, is less about what it means to be a woman (especially in a world without men) and more about what it means to be a human. 

The Child is the sole person of her generation and grew up without society as we know it now. She begins as ignorant and resentful of the women and their knowledge of the old world (school, dating, families, careers, men), but soon overcomes this and embraces her freedom from such traditions. Unhampered by memories of the past, she makes her own role among “The Women.” She becomes a skilled carpenter, builder, and inventor;  an executor of mercy for women who were suffering from incurable illness;  an explorer; and finally a historian and writer. 

Harpman's land without men is unlike other versions of feminist fiction, and specifically differs from novels about female-centric societies, in that it is not described as a utopia in which women are shown to be superior to men (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland or Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Matter of Seggri). Nor does it proclaim women in power to be just as corruptible as men (Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking or Naomi Alderman’s The Power). In current literature, perhaps Christina Sweeney Baird’s The End of Men, comes closest to what Harpman achieves in IWHNKM, as both novels deal with the feeling of loss brought on by the absence of men from society. In this way, this novel neither argues for or against a land without men. It simply opines on what we as humans could be if we cast off tradition and forged a new path.

This novel is not about The Women, but The Child. The narrator’s successful self-actualization by the end of the tale elucidates on what a child can become when she is not ensnared by expectations. Rather than talking to us about anything that is inherent in womanhood, I Who Have Never Known Men talks to us about what is inherent in personhood. It offers contemporary readers a chance to reflect on what makes us a woman and what makes us us. 

Despite the fact that the guards were all men, the women find evidence that men were also imprisoned on the planet. It is, therefore, not a tale of men vs. women, but rather us vs. them. Perhaps that is what this novel brings us today that it couldn’t in 1995. Perhaps if Harpman had written the novel to emphasize what women could become without the influence of men, it would have been more successful in the 1990s’ world of third-wave feminism when the rebellious and liberated individual was eulogized. Today, however, feminism has moved beyond men vs. women to focus more on systemic issues. Today the novel resonates differently: See what a child can become without the influence of the Patriarchy. 

I Who Have Never Known Men is recommended for readers who liked:

• Station Eleven’s theme of humanity at the end of the world.

• The straightforward story-telling of Kim Ji-young: Born 1982.

• Annie Bot’s tale of a character gaining self-awareness and autonomy.

Sarah Denison is a digital nomad from Kentucky. She has worked with three literary journals including Kelp Journal. She enjoys memoirs, literary fiction, poetry, mysteries, science nonfiction, and cozy sci-fi. Her favorite place to read is in a tent by flashlight.