There’s a Judy Horacek cartoon in which a woman tells a friend that she once intended to be the perfect wife, a domestic goddess. When the friend asks, ‘So what happened?’, the woman replies, ‘They taught me to read.’

Many women will relate to this, perhaps including Dale Kent (no relation to this reviewer). The Most I Could Be is the story of her struggle to reconcile her 1950s upbringing – which carried an expectation that she would marry, have children, and disappear into domesticity – with her urgent need to prove herself intellectually in a wider world.