Portrait of a marriage

In her foreword to Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 classic, The Tortoise and the Hare, Hilary Mantel reminds us of the unaccountability of love

Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage is a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluffs and regroupings — a campaign pursued, sometimes, until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are fighting over, or have abandoned their first objectives in favour of secret ones.

I have admired this exquisitely written novel for many years, partly for its focus on a fascinating and lost social milieu, but also because through her close attention to the negotiations between men and women, and women and women, Elizabeth Jenkins has provided a thoughtful and astringent guide to the imperatives of sexual politics — and one which is of more than historical interest.