Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage is a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluffs and regroupings — a campaign pursued, sometimes, until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are fighting over, or have abandoned their first objectives in favour of secret ones.
I have admired this exquisitely written novel for many years, partly for its focus on a fascinating and lost social milieu, but also because through her close attention to the negotiations between men and women, and women and women, Elizabeth Jenkins has provided a thoughtful and astringent guide to the imperatives of sexual politics — and one which is of more than historical interest.
In 2004, in her hundredth year, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote a memoir called The View from Downshire Hill. It offers graceful and startlingly fresh pictures from a long writing life, concentrating on her earlier years; educated at Cambridge, condescended to by Virginia Woolf, befriended by Elizabeth Bowen, she lived at the heart of English cultural life and published 23 books.
She wrote biographies of Elizabeth I, of Lady Caroline Lamb, and of Jane Austen. She was a founder member of the Jane Austen Society, one of those practical enthusiasts who bought and restored Jane’s house at Chawton, saved it from dereliction, furnished it with impeccable attention to the period, and opened it to the public.
Jenkins’s hypersensitivity to atmosphere may remind readers of Rebecca West. Her eye for colour and texture, her precise descriptions of the civilised surfaces of life, recall Sybille Bedford.
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