Elizabeth Zott is a research scientist trying to make her way in a man’s world. It’s 1952, a time when women are expected to give up their careers to get married and have children. But Elizabeth isn’t content having her work sidelined – or, worse still, stolen – by her male colleagues at California’s Hastings Research Institute, so she resolves to keep working and never get married. When she falls in love with Calvin Evans, a Nobel-nominated chemist, she declines his marriage proposal but agrees to move in with him and get a dog.
Bonnie Garmus’s smart and funny feminist fable – a TV adaptation of which arrives this month on Apple TV+ starring Brie Larson – is read by the British actor Miranda Raison, who delights in Elizabeth’s pithy observations on the many ways women are undermined by men. An unconventional and charismatic heroine determined to live life on her terms, Elizabeth must find ever more ingenious ways to make a living and challenge the status quo.
