Someone at a Distance (Persephone Classics)

“A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love.”—The Spectator

Written in 1953, the last book by best-selling novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a quietly gripping story about the destruction of a marriage. Ellen is “that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife” who loves her life in the English countryside. She tends her garden, dotes on her children, and, when she remembers, visits her cantankerous mother-in-law. This domestic bliss, however, is shattered when her husband, in a moment of weak mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl.

Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Mrs. Gaskell. In her preface, Nina Bawden states, “it is a great gift to be able to take an ordinary tale and make it compulsive reading. It is all in the telling and Whipple is a storyteller—an art that cannot be taught, cannot be learned, an art only a few writers are lucky enough to be born with. . . . Someone at a Distance is a brilliant account of frailty and folly.”

Born in 1893 in Lancashire, England, Dorothy Whipple wrote nine extremely successful novels, two of which were made into films. She also wrote short stories and two memoirs. She died in 1966.