Someone at a Distance

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.”