When She Was Good

When She Was Good (1967) is Philip Roth's only novel with a female protagonist, Lucy Nelson.


Works by Philip Roth
Fiction
  • Goodbye, Columbus
  • Letting Go
  • When She Was Good
  • Portnoy's Complaint
  • Our Gang
  • The Great American Novel
  • My Life As a Man
  • Sabbath's Theater
Kepesh Novels
  • The Breast
  • The Professor of Desire
  • The Dying Animal
Zuckerman Novels
  • The Ghost Writer
  • Zuckerman Unbound
  • The Anatomy Lesson
  • The Prague Orgy
  • The Counterlife
  • American Pastoral
  • I Married a Communist
  • The Human Stain
  • Exit Ghost
Roth Novels
  • Deception
  • Operation Shylock
  • The Plot Against America
Nemeses: Short Novels
  • Everyman
  • Indignation
  • The Humbling
  • Nemesis
Short Stories
  • "The Conversion of the Jews"
  • "Defender of the Faith"
  • "The Kind of Person I am"
  • "Epstein"
  • "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings"
  • "Eli, the Fanatic"
  • "Philosophy, or Something Like That"
  • "The Box of Truths"
  • "The Fence"
  • "Armando and the Frauds"
  • "The Final Delivery of Mr. Thorn"
  • "The Day It Snowed"
  • "The Contest for Aaron Gold"
  • "Heard Melodies Are Sweeter"
  • "Expect the Vandals"
  • "The Love Vessel"
  • "The Good Girl"
  • "The Mistaken"
  • "Novotny's Pain"
  • "Psychoanalytic Special"
  • "An Actor's Life for Me"
  • "On the Air"
  • "His Mistress's Voice"
  • "Smart Money"
  • "The Ultimatum"
  • "Drenka's Men"
  • "Communist"
Collections
  • Zuckerman Bound
  • A Philip Roth Reader
  • Library of America series
Non-fiction
Memoirs
  • The Facts
  • Patrimony
On Writing
  • Reading Myself and Others
  • Shop Talk
Adaptations
Films
  • Goodbye, Columbus
  • Portnoy's Complaint
  • The Human Stain
  • Elegy
Philip Roth bibliography

Famous quotes containing the words when she, when, she, was and/or good:

    “What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, a license to be different from your mother and still be loved. . . . Freedom is . . . not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.”
    —Erica Jong (20th century)

    “Most writers steal a good thing when they can,
    And when ‘tis safely got ‘tis worth the winning.
    The worst of ‘t is we now and then detect ‘em,
    Before they ever dream that we suspect ‘em.”
    —Bryan Waller Proctor (1787–1874)

    “Who then is she,
    She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her,
    Drives out the father from the caesared camp;
    The dens of shape
    Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
    That she I have,
    The country-handed grave boxed into love....”
    —Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)

    “It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “Our wedding day, twenty years ago! A happy day. Darling is handsomer than she was then, with a glorious flow of friendly feeling and cheerfulness, genuine womanly character, a most affectionate mother, a good, good wife. How I love her! What a lucky man I was and am!”
    —Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)