Volume Two is the one. Volume One I read with a pencil and a great deal of pink.

Strengths, and they're large. The section on lived experience holds the best sustained observation I've read about ordinary constraint: the girlhood chapters, the marriage chapters, the passage on housework as labour that leaves no trace by the end of the day. I put yellow on 31 separate sentences and I'm not a generous tabber.

The faults are concentrated and easy to state. Volume One leans on biology and psychoanalysis that were shaky when written and are worse now — and the argument doesn't need them. I marked nine places where a claim about hormones or an appeal to Freud carries weight the historical material could have carried better on its own. My edition also has a translator's note explaining what the previous English version cut, which is close to 15 percent, and reading that note first changes how you read everything after it.

She's also long. I don't usually mind long. But there are three chapters in Volume One making an identical move and I'd have lost two of them without complaint.

Nine, and I want to be clear the missing point is for padding and dated science, not for the temperature of the thing. It runs hot in places and it has earned that.

I read it across four months, mostly on Sunday afternoons, and I'd recommend that pace over any attempt at a sprint.