La tortuga y la liebre

Imogen Gresham is thirty-seven years old, a beautiful, diligent woman, sensitive to nature and devoted to the well-being of her demanding husband. A highly prestigious lawyer, fifteen years her senior, he is accustomed to being admired, detests anything not useful, and expects nothing from his wife but a well-ordered household. They live in a large house in a Berkshire village and have an eleven-year-old son who calls his mother "a complete idiot" and adds, "She does nothing, she just suffers." This suffering is increasingly linked to the growing presence in her husband's life of a neighbor, Blanche Silcox, a wealthy, fifty-year-old spinster, a pillar of the community, who enjoys hunting and riding and speaks with brusque, coarse manners in an unusually authoritarian tone. Imogen watches with horror and despair as Blanche brazenly offers her husband everything she herself seems incapable of providing. Every little hint of this adulterous affair is like torture, slowly eroding her self-esteem and erasing a personality she no longer remembers having. The Tortoise and the Hare (1954), one of Elizabeth Jenkins's most acclaimed novels, revolves around some of the most dubious virtues of British women: restraint, abstinence, and "endurance." The novel is a profound, subtle, and scathing analysis of the premises upon which a conventional marriage is built, as well as the circumstances and emotional fabric that unravel it.