Author(s): Gertrude Trevelyan

Fiction

One of the most powerful psychological portraits in all fiction, back in print after over 80 years.

When Jane marries the elderly grocer William Chirp, she thinks she has moved up into the comfort of middle class. Instead, she discovers that William exerts a control over her life that forces her to live like a prisoner. His tight fistedness and suspicions so affect Jane that even after his death, she finds herself trapped in a penny pinching paranoia and resorts to scavenging for food out of garbage bins and taking her silverware with her everywhere in a shopping bag. Utterly forgotten for decades, neither the book nor its author are mentioned in any history of 20th century English literature. Yet Trevelyan is arguably the finest novelist of the generation to follow Virginia Woolf and William’s Wife is her most intense and unforgettable books.