To take Avery away from Ellen will give Louise power again and restore her self-confidence. She is escaping the humiliation of being rejected by a man above her in the social hierarchy of the French provincial town where her parents tiptoe around her afraid of what they have hatched. The tragedy to come is foreshadowed when Louise, coming as companion to old Mrs North, reads aloud to her from Emma Bovary. This is not a plot-driven novel what interested Dorothy Whipple was character, and she writes about people with acute psychological insight, subtly through telling little details and in simple everyday scenes. But the way it all happens makes the novel a page turner. Is it the kind of opening that would make agents jump up and down with excitement if they came across it in a submission today? Probably not, which is sad for those of us who love this kind of straightforward honest prose and storytelling.ĭorothy Whipple herself described it as ‘a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage.’ There is the deceived wife, the foolishly weak husband, the envious, greedy French girl who sets out to seduce him to console herself, the traumatised teenaged children. This is the opening of Dorothy Whipple’s last novel Someone at a Distance. She didn’t come first with anybody and she didn’t like that. Old Mrs North’s husband had spoilt her, but now that he was dead and her three children married, no one spoilt her any more. She answered an advertisement in the personal column of The Times. Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company.

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple