For months, ever since she had first seen the new house, her own [spirits] had been soaring. She have rediscovered energy that she thought had long ago died; at the prospect of living by herself, in her own home, without Graham, without the load of a marriage that had become intolerable, she had felt herself flung helter-skelter without time to assess or reason, into a life of hope and good sense. She had been unable to sleep at nights, hurrying out of bed to add something more to a list, to write some reminder to herself; or else she had lain on the back, her arms behind her head, smiling at her fantasies and almost unendurably impatient. It seemed at this time incredible to her that she could have endured the last five years of her marriage. She did not even think about it, erasing a quarter of a century of love and passion and habit with plans for curtain rails and bookshelves and where the pictures would hang and what, above all, she would create for her children: after years of anxiety and distress there would once more be a home. She would make it alone, untrammelled, a free human being.

Just as she did in The Pumpkin Eater, the author here explores the roles of motherhood and wifehood acting as a prison on a woman's identity. Specifically she looks at what happens post-motherhood and post-wifehood, the inability as well as the reluctance to let go of an identity which has so defined and, in turn, restricted you.

I'm in awe of the way she can so deftly illustrate in just a few lines the complex history and dynamics of a family relationship, the things said and left unsaid, the years of enforced closeness which has now also armed you with the weapons required for its utter destruction. This is only my second Mortimer but definitely not my last. ( )