Kat Meads is a writer Donna Gessell has returned to more than once — her earlier essay collection 2:12 a.m. earned a review in these same pages. With Miss Jane: The Lost Years, Meads turns to fiction, and the result is something sharper, stranger, and more satisfying than a conventional campus novel has any right to be.

The title signals what kind of education this will be. Miss Jane is a farm-bred college senior, “under-schooled in books and life,” drawn into the orbit of Prof P — tenured, self-regarding, and entirely convinced of his own magnificence. What follows is narrated not by Jane herself but by a collectively voiced female chorus, historically aware and openly pissed off. The technique gives Meads room to be both funny and devastating, often in the same sentence.

The chorus form is the book’s great achievement. It transforms a story that could easily become a single woman’s private wound into something communal, almost Greek in its insistence that this is not one story but many. Meads’s prose crackles with controlled fury and dark comedy. Her Jane is not simply a victim; she is someone being educated — painfully, reluctantly, and ultimately on her own terms.

Published in 2018, the novel arrives with particular resonance. But Meads is too rigorous a writer to let the moment do the work for her. Miss Jane: The Lost Years earns its anger and its title. The education it chronicles is unwanted, yes — and, in the end, detoxifyingly satisfying.