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 was good, when she, when, she, was and/or good:

    “There was a little girl
    Who had a little curl
    Right in the middle of her forehead,
    When she was good
    She was very, very good,
    But when she was bad she was horrid.”
    —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1822)

    “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)

    “Kings were wont to honour philosophers; but if I had such I would honour them as angels that should have such purity in them that they would not seek when they are the second to be the first, and when they are third to be the second.”
    —Elizabeth I (1533–1603)

    “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)

    “You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki’s was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.”
    —William Gibson (b. 1948)

    “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)