The Bachmann story, “Three Paths to the Lake,” appears in her collection Three Paths to the Lake (the original German title was Simultan), which was published in 1972, a year before she died of burns suffered in a fire. Five stories. Five women, each one suffering from some form of emotional turmoil, each one feeling trapped, isolated, anxious, and confused about her place in patriarchal society, and struggling for a language to express what she’s going through.

George Balanchine said, If you put a group of men on the stage, you have a group of men, but if you put a group of women on the stage you have the whole world.

If you put a group of women in a book, you have “women’s fiction.” To be shunned by almost all male readers and no few female ones as well.

When Bachmann, who from an early age had been renowned for her poetry, began publishing stories, they were dismissed by critics as Frauengeschichten, meaning stories about banal and insignificant matters, female concerns of possible interest only to other women. (Bachmann herself first imagined the book as a kind of homage to the women of her native Austria.)

Around the same time that Bachmann’s collection was published, in a novel in progress Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: Do you know a happy woman?

The catcalling men turned out to be plainclothes cops. They arrested the woman. I forget how her story ends.

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I have learned that there exists a word, onsra, in Bodo, a language spoken by the Bodo people in parts of northeastern India, that is used to describe the poignant emotion a person experiences when that person realizes that the love they have been sharing with another is destined not to endure. This word, which has no equivalent in English, has been translated as “to love for the last time.” Misleading. Most English-speaking people would probably take “to love for the last time” to mean to have at long last found one’s true, enduring love. For example, in a song composed by Carole King called “Love for the Last Time.” But when I first learned this translation of onsra I thought it meant something else entirely. I thought it meant to have experienced a love so overwhelming, so fierce and deep, that you could never ever ever love again.

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I’ve never liked the genre of women’s fiction known as romance, but I am fascinated by stories of women in love, especially when the love is in some way unconventional or especially difficult, hopeless even, or frankly insane.

Women in Strange Love might be the title of a collection of such stories.