Her salvation, she decides, will come through writing a book, inspired by a medieval family heirloom called A Woemans Worth, written anonymously and espousing the substitution of a more able man in the place of an inadequate husband. She wants to love her husband for his steady ability to provide, yet she gets enormous erotic charge by initiating Gabriel into her wildest secret desires. Little by little, addressing herself and the reader as “You,” the unnamed narrator reveals some of her shockingly repressed secrets: she can’t stand her husband in bed, and she’s never, never had an orgasm. Months later, on a delayed honeymoon in Marrakech, she overhears Cole on the phone with her best friend, Theo, and decides the two must be having an affair-thus beginning her path of crushing emotional revenge in the form of frigid withdrawal and, eventually, full-blown sensuous enlightenment with Gabriel, a Spanish-English virgin actor. English-Australian Gemmell ( Alice Springs, 1999, etc.) pens a strangely unnerving fourth novel in the second person, published anonymously in England last year, about the sexual tribulations of a bourgeois wife grasping for gratification within marriage and without.Ī journalism professor at the University of London marries in her mid-30s and quits her job at the urging of new husband, international art restorer Cole, to become a full-time wife.
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