The Narrated Woman is a newsletter for women narrating themselves — the work of putting felt midlife experience into language, of recognising the structural patterns underneath what gets called personal failure, of naming what most women carry in silence.

The title holds two meanings deliberately. The Narrated Woman is the woman who has been narrated — by structures she didn’t choose — and the woman learning to narrate herself. My writing sits at the second move.

The lens is the felt texture of being a woman in midlife: motherhood, marriage, friendships, careers, the body. The audience isn’t pre-committed to a demographic. I write for women in the middle of things — often in transition between identities and life phases, frequently in the position of being the one nobody worries about.

I write essays, not articles. They start with a specific felt moment — a 9am Tuesday at the desk, a half-said sentence in a friendship, a thought that surfaced at 3am — and follow it patiently. I name experiences that don’t yet have language. I don’t offer tidy solutions, five-step frameworks, or optimistic reframings. I sit with the question rather than resolving it, and invite you to do the same.

I’m Alice. I teach at Exeter University, am undertaking a PhD at Bath University on what professional life asks you to carry in silence, and I have three children. The Narrated Woman is the literary counterpart to the theoretical work my PhD is doing on the same ground.

Your time is scarce. Almost everyone wants a piece of it, and most of what you do isn’t actually for you. The choice to spend any of it here is not lost on me.

I’ll be careful with it. I won’t pad. I won’t send for the sake of sending. What lands in your inbox will be what I can stand behind.