BEST BOOKS ON... THE PERILS OF ENVY

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.

MY DARKEST day in primary school involved a girl and a crayon. There was this new colour — cherry red — which we’d all longed for, but she got there first and there was a horrible scene. The shame of it still burns — hair-pulling is heinous.

Though in my defence, I was seven. The colour was beautiful. And envy is a deeply toxic thing.

I’ve tried, ever since, to look without malice at the pencil cases of others. Madame Bovary is there to remind us what can happen when we don’t. She’s a silly woman; always with her head in a book (we don’t mind that), but the wrong books (that we do). Those books are not so much windows into lives, but shop windows of all the stuff she wants and doesn’t have.

Stuck in a French provincial town with a dull husband, she bewails ‘the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her own narrow home’. Her envy — social and material — is her undoing. Her punishment is final. She has several lessons, but just never learns and dies a terrible death.

Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs is angry. She’s Nora, 42, an unmarried teacher, a good citizen and a good woman. And she feels almost invisible until she meets the exotic Shahids. The son is her ideal child, the husband her perfect man, the woman — she wrongly believes — her idealised self.

She falls in love with them, wants to have them, wants to be them so much she’s half-mad with it. And leaves herself open to a hideous betrayal.

So let’s hear it for Sarah in Jo Baker’s Longbourn, maid to the Bennets (of Pride & Prejudice): their lives are all silk and dances, hers just chilblains and hard work. One night, she steals over the fields to watch a ball through a window expecting to envy them and is instead struck by the tedious, hollow nature of their lives. ‘Her envy puffed up into smoke and was gone on the wind.’ She turns away in disgust.

Her reward? To fall straight into the arms of the exotic footman there under the trees . . .