'Does a wife exist only when her husband is contemplating her?....A wife is called into being only by a husband: therefore does she cease to exist when he stops observing her, stops regarding her?
'Elinor leaves her husband suddenly and goes to France, to the village of Severac-le-Chateau. There she ponders the lives of other women. In the seventeenth century a wife is murdered for faithlessness: in the early twentieth century a woman embroiders sheets for a trousseau never needed; in the 1980's a successful pediatrician may or may not know what her husband is up to.
'Elinor's process of transformation - from a wife to a self - is written with subtlety and humour. The journey she undertakes is more than a journey of the flesh.'
Source: Publlisher's blurb (Minerva ed.).
