Pénélope

"The late John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all literature.
You go on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Since women, for so many years, were denied the journey, they were left with only one plot in their lives-to await the stranger. [...] While the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a change of tendency, women's literature form Austen to Wolf is by and large a literature about waiting, usually for love."

The Virago Book of Women Travellers, ed.by Mary Morris