Miss Herbert: (The Suburban Wife)
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Behind the respectable facade of a pretty English woman lies a life of quiet delusion and relentless self-deception — Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) chronicles the story of Eleanor Herbert, a woman convinced of her own exceptional worth yet condemned by her own passivity and romantic fantasies to a life of mediocrity, failed marriages, and missed opportunities in mid-twentieth-century England. Christina Stead constructs Eleanor not as a villain but as a tragic product of a society that rewards conformity and punishes authenticity, trapping women in roles defined by beauty, domesticity, and dependence. Stead's prose is razor-sharp, laced with an irony that cuts through Eleanor's self-mythologising with devastating precision, placing this novel firmly within the tradition of great feminist social critique. Written with the same unflinching psychological acuity that defines her masterwork The Man Who Loved Children, Stead dissects the suburban dream with surgical clarity, laying bare the gap between ambition and reality. For readers who believe they have already met every variety of self-deceived protagonist literature has to offer, Eleanor Herbert will prove them gloriously wrong.
Author: Christina Stead
Format: Hardback
Published: 1979, Virago, London
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Behind the respectable facade of a pretty English woman lies a life of quiet delusion and relentless self-deception — Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) chronicles the story of Eleanor Herbert, a woman convinced of her own exceptional worth yet condemned by her own passivity and romantic fantasies to a life of mediocrity, failed marriages, and missed opportunities in mid-twentieth-century England. Christina Stead constructs Eleanor not as a villain but as a tragic product of a society that rewards conformity and punishes authenticity, trapping women in roles defined by beauty, domesticity, and dependence. Stead's prose is razor-sharp, laced with an irony that cuts through Eleanor's self-mythologising with devastating precision, placing this novel firmly within the tradition of great feminist social critique. Written with the same unflinching psychological acuity that defines her masterwork The Man Who Loved Children, Stead dissects the suburban dream with surgical clarity, laying bare the gap between ambition and reality. For readers who believe they have already met every variety of self-deceived protagonist literature has to offer, Eleanor Herbert will prove them gloriously wrong.