William's Wife

Written by Gertrude Trevelyan

Narrated by Catherine Bailey

Length

7h 27m

"Utterly forgotten for over 80 years, William’s Wife is one of the most powerful psychological portraits in all fiction. When Jane marries the elderly grocer William Chirp, she thinks she has moved up into the comfort of middle class. Instead, she discovers that William exerts a control over her life that forces her to live like a prisoner. His tight-fistedness and suspicions so affect Jane that even after his death, she finds herself trapped in a penny-pinching paranoia and resorts to scavenging for food out of garbage bins and taking her silverware with her everywhere in a shopping bag. William's Wife is one of the most effective accounts of marital abuse and the onset and experience of mental illness, which still resonates today. Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan was born in Bath in 1903. She came to fame as the first woman to win the Newdigate Prize for best undergraduate poem at Oxford in 1927. Starting with Appius and Virginia in 1932, she published eight novels, her last being Trance by Appointment in 1939. She was injured when a German bomb struck her flat in October 1940 and she died at her parents' home in Bath in March 1941. A co-publication with Boiler House Press."