Marya's eleven chapter episodic structure creates a female heroic journey involving departure, initiation, and return. Where the male heroic structure tends to propel the hero on a solitary journey with encounters that involve conquering obstacles, Marya's journey propels her into encounters that involve negotiating relationships. Her return home does not complete the journey as much as it begins the most significant part where she will negotiate her sense of self by coming to terms with her mother. Marya is a twentiethcentury Jane Eyre who survives an abusive childhood, but where fane Eyre (1847) comes to a neat closure involving the heroine's marriage, Marya ends without any outcome predicted in the search for the mother.

Many of the chapters of Marya were published as separate short stories, and they stand up well as complete stories.

This does not, however, detract from the sense of the wholeness...