"Someone at a Distance," by Dorothy Whipple

A few days ago (1/24/12) I wrote about my happy “discovery” of the English writer Dorothy Whipple, whose fiction had been popular in the mid-20th-century but fell out of fashion and was soon not easily accessible, until the wonderful Persephone Press republished her novels and stories in the past 15 or so years. In that post I wrote about Whipple’s short story collection, “The Closed Door.” Because I liked that book so much, I have now read one of her novels, her last one, titled “Someone at a Distance” (Persephone, 1999, but originally published by John Murray, 1953). This is a story of a happy marriage and family that is slowly and, it seems, inexorably destroyed by a snake in the garden in the form of a young French woman who has come to stay with the family, ostensibly to tutor the daughter in French. As readers, we watch with dismay as this beautiful but utterly selfish young woman, with no conscience whatsoever, takes what (and whom) she wants, with no regard for the devastation she leaves behind. The contrast between the original paradise and the ruins that follow is positively Biblical. The main character, Ellen, is a typical 1950s wife and mother, who happily builds her life around her husband, children, home, and garden. She is quite selfless and also quite naïve and unsuspecting that anyone could consciously come into her home and steal her husband and happiness. As a reader, I couldn’t help but like and admire Ellen very much, and feel sorry for her. I also admired that even after the ruin of her marriage, she managed to pick herself up and stay strong for the children and for her future. It is an old, old story, of course: the conniving female interloper, the husband who is too vulnerable to an attractive female’s paying attention to him, and the resultant drama and upheavals. But somehow Whipple manages to keep us interested and caring about how the characters live and how the story will turn out; she rewards us with a few twists and turns toward the end of the novel that are ambiguous but somewhat positive. As in the short story collection, the writing here is deceptively simple but lovely, and the insights into human motivations and behavior are “spot on,” as the British say, or at least used to say! I will definitely be reading more of Whipple’s fiction.