Two Is Lonely was published by Chatto & Windus in 1974, completing the Jane Graham trilogy that began with The L-Shaped Room. Banks, who had herself emigrated to Israel (living on a kibbutz from 1962 to 1971), drew on her own experience to follow Jane from England to the Middle East — a displacement that is simultaneously geographical, psychological, and cultural.
Jane and her son David travel to Israel, where she works on a kibbutz — the communal agricultural settlements that represented, in the 1960s and early 1970s, a radical alternative to Western individualism. The kibbutz offers Jane what England couldn’t: community, practical support for single motherhood (communal childcare, shared meals), and a sense of purpose larger than personal survival.
But the kibbutz also demands conformity: individual desires are subordinated to collective needs, privacy is limited, and the ideological framework (socialist Zionism) requires commitment that Jane — an English individualist — cannot fully give. The novel explores the tension between her need for community and her need for autonomy, between the security the kibbutz offers and the freedom it removes.
Banks writes about Israel with the ambivalence of an insider who is also an outsider: she understands the kibbutz ideal (and lived it for nine years) but also sees its limitations — its treatment of Arab workers, its suppression of individual difference, and its particular difficulty for women who don’t fit the collective model.
Collecting Two Is Lonely
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- US first (Simon & Schuster, 1974): $8–$15