She buys a set of learn Spanish records, but only plays the first one once she buys a painting set and enrols in an adult painting class. Thus she is enforced to live a life of leisure, and she struggles with that too. They have help, so there’s no need for her to do actual housework.
She struggles to understand her children she struggles to understand her husband too.ĭuring the day when the children at school, she struggles to stay busy. Being brought up with genteel good manners, being hidebound by them and the requirements of the country club circle in which she lives. She desperately tries to be a good housewife. “Why, just look at those cuffs! Anyone would think we’ were on our way to the poorhouse.” Since he was already wearing the shirt this struck him as a foolish question, but he said, “It looks perfectly okay to me.” “Surely you don’t intend to wear that shirt?” He looked down at the threads as though he had never before seen them in fact he hadn’t. “For heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed, taking hold of his sleeve. Thus it was that Mrs Bridge discovered Douglas wearing a shirt with cuffs that were noticeably frayed. Ordinarily Mrs Bridge examined the laundry that Ingrid carried up from the basement every Tuesday afternoon in a creaking wicker basket, but when she was out shopping, or at a luncheon, the job fell to Harriet who never paid much attention to such things as missing buttons or loose elastic. There is much humour, particularly in her exchanges with son Douglas who is typically exasperating… Each chapterette is perfectly structured – like a little short story, with its introduction, development and ending. Her story is told in a series of 117 vignettes, which vary in length from a paragraph to a few pages.
They have three children, each separated by a couple of years: Ruth, Carolyn and Douglas. She’s married to the well-off but workaholic Mr Bridge, and they live in a nice suburban house in a nice area of the city. Set between the wars, Mrs Bridge is the story of a Kansas City housewife. He wrote several other novels, collections of short stories, essays and poems and was nominated for a Man Booker International Prize in 2009. Mr Bridge followed ten years later in 1969. Mrs Bridge was his first novel, published in 1959 he’d previously written a set of short stories. On a further note, it was only when I looked up Connell to write this post, that I found out he died on January 10th this year, aged 89. Penguin have done a magnificent job with the new paperbacks reproducing the original cover artwork and with new introductions (by Joshua Ferris for Mrs Bridge) but they also went one step further, commissioning a limited edition from Thomas Heatherwick of a slipcased set of interlocking hardbacks, which truly captures the relationship between the couple and their stories. Before I start telling you about the novel though, a note on the editions.
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