William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

I’m delighted that Recovered Books is making G.E. Trevelyan’s novels available again, because they have been so very difficult to get hold of. The next (after they published Two Thousand Million Man-Power) is William’s Wife (1938), a novel that is perhaps less ambitious, but I think even more successful.

As the novel opens, Jane has just married William Chirp. We don’t see any of their courtship or really get to understand what ended up with these two fairly unsuited people coming together in marriage. But perhaps we can guess – William is a widower who runs a grocer’s in the town and probably wants somebody at home to make his life comfortable again. Jane is a lady’s maid who is moving up in the world by marrying a man who owns a business and a home. No matter that they have little in common and even less to talk about.

Quickly, Jane learns the dominant characteristic of William: miserliness. He might call it prudence, or living within his means. But he begrudges every penny spent. And he is willing to live in almost any condition, so long as he avoids expenditure. The hints of this come steadily, though at first it’s minor matters about the home (I am borrowing some of the same quotes that Brad included in his review – Brad being the mastermind behind the Recovered Books series.)

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

William is not a violent person by any means, but he has a certainty and a determination that Jane seems unequal to combat. Nor does she try especially hard – any attempts to get money from him, beyond the meagre housekeeping allowance, are met with his rigid logic or by references to the angelic, unquestioning nature of his first wife. Jane, meanwhile, is ashamed of her wearing-out clothes or what people from the town would think if they knew how poorly they lived.

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Eventually, the worm turns. Jane begins to find ways to save a little money herself. She buys slightly cheaper products and keeps the difference. She drops less in the church collection than William gives her, and keeps the change. Slowly but surely she amasses enough to buy a new dress – relying on his masculine ignorance of women’s clothing to pass it off as a mere adjustment to her previous dress. And then saving begins again. She moves her stash every day, fearful that it be unearthed and her whole scheme tumble to the ground. The reader doesn’t think that William would be violent or throw her out or anything – but somehow Trevelyan builds up the tension so that we are equally afraid of its discovery.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know something that happens midway through the novel – but I think it’s important to an understanding of the novel to mention it (and it’s on the back of the book, so I don’t feel too bad about mentioning it). Eventually William dies. Jane, you would think, is free from his oppression. And yet… somehow she has become too mired in his worldview. The second half of the novel is even more powerful than the first. Her miserliness gets worse and worse – her cutting corners and making savings leaves in a terrible, haunting way to her losing everything that gives her status and dignity. She has truly, in every sense, become ‘William’s wife’. It is horrifying but ineluctable, and masterfully done by Trevelyan.

What makes William’s Wife such a success is Trevelyan’s ingenious pacing. The reader isn’t spared anything. Day by day, month by month, we follow Jane’s decline. There is little that is dramatic or surprising – instead, she sets up her premise and follows it steadily to its natural climax. The blurb calls it ‘the most normal horror story ever written’, and while blurbs that call their book the ‘most’ anything are to be distrusted, it’s not an inaccurate description. It isn’t scary, in the usual sense of scary. But it is haunting. It is a horror story in the sense that it is horribly believable – perhaps the sort of miserable world behind any number of closed doors. Interestingly, it really reminded me of an ostensibly very different Recovered Books novel – Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. Both take an awful situation and play it out slowly, painstakingly to its end.

It’s not the most fun book to read, but there is an awful lot to admire here. Trevelyan chooses different canvases and subjects for the three novels of hers I’ve read so far – this one has the narrowest subject in mind, and perhaps that is why it is the most successful novel. It does what she sets out to do with terrible brilliance. It certainly deserves its republication, and I recommend getting a copy – when you can stomach the experience. (Incidentally, at the time of writing it is on sale from the publisher.)