Racing hearts in a desperate affair
Book club choice Elizabeth Jenkins takes a nuanced look at the ‘other woman’, says Violet Hudson
Elizabeth Jenkins, who died aged 104 in 2010, was born into a staunchly Methodist family. She attended Cambridge, where an acquaintance with the Stracheys led to a brief foray into Bloomsburyism. After teaching English, and working in the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, she became a full-time writer and, over a long career, produced some two dozen volumes of fiction and biography. Jenkins’s work about Elizabeth I,
Elizabeth and Leicester, was the first to suggest that the Virgin Queen was incapable of relationships, thanks to the gruesome deaths of her mother Anne Boleyn and stepmothers Catherine Howard and Jane Seymour.
Jenkins’s best work, and one of only two to remain in print, is The Tortoise
and The Hare (1954). It charts the dissolution of the marriage of arrogant, boorish barrister Evelyn Gresham and his fatally passive, beautiful wife, Imogen. Evelyn begins an affair with the tweedy and efficient Blanche Silcox. He erases Imogen’s confidence with pedantry and hectoring, saying “with forced patience, ‘You don’t care to do the things that give a great deal of pleasure to me… You don’t want to fish or shoot… Am I to understand that you object to my having the companionship of another woman who can do these things?” Poor beleaguered Imogen hasn’t the backbone to battle him.
Jenkins is adroit at capturing emotional nuance, and her perspicacity extends beyond her human characters to nature, too. In September, “a gold chestnut fan sailed down from some unseen tree and tinkled on the pavement”. The Tortoise
and The Hare reverses expectations about what the other woman should be like. By the end of the novel, you are left wondering who is the tortoise and who is the hare.