A Secret Madness: The Story of a Marriage

by Elaine Bass

Overview

In post-war London two girls are relieved to find husbands. One lands the 1950s dream of wealth and security. The other, Elaine, endures fourteen years married to a man with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. At first Elaine finds Gerald's activities curious but manageable. But he grows increasingly withdrawn, sometimes violent. The birth of their daughter heralds a complete breakdown and five years of silence, fear and despair. With startling honesty and great eloquence, Bass describes their poverty, her loneliness, her fears for her child, finding comfort in an affair with the village doctor and how the relationship finally ends. A Secret Madness is a remarkable personal evocation of an era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847650863
Publisher:	Profile
Publication date:	08/06/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Elaine Bass is 84 years old. She has two children and lives with her second husband in Norfolk. This is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

"It's a harrowing and thought-provoking book, and should cure any nostalgia for the way we lived in the fifties. The reader feels the author's lonely plight acutely. And one must admire a woman, isolated and unsupported, who uses her own intelligence to construct sense in the strange and frightening world into which her marriage took her. And one who has such emotional stamina."—Hilary Mantel

"The writing is brilliantly evocative of an era when the effects of rationing were commonplace, when there was still National Service and BBC radio plays were an evening's entertainment." - Daily Express

"What's she's achieved is quite remarkable... no ordinary book."- Woman's Weekly

"This is a study in saintly forbearance, but also in the innocence of a time that knew little of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, was shocked by sexual deviance, and when the Freudian precepts we take for granted were not yet in place."- Sunday Times Culture

From the Publisher