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Carolyn Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was shaped by her mother's longing: What she actually wanted were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her... When world didn't deliver goods, she held world to blame. When Carolyn Steedman grows up and begins to look for reflections of her and her mother's lives in history, theory, and literature, she finds that the tradition of cultural criticism that has employed working-class lives, and their rare expression in literature, has made solid and concrete absence of psychological individuality - of subjectivity. Through an in-depth comparison of personal experience and prevailing political and social science theory on psychology and attitudes of working-class people, Landscape for a Good Woman challenges an intellectual tradition that denies its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis. In this poignantly written and thoroughly researched work, common theoretical conclusion that survival struggles of working-class people precludes time necessary for more genteel elaboration of relationships is shot full of delightfully life-affirming holes.