Chapters (48)
- Cover
- Praise
- About the Author
- Also by Tricia Stringer
- Title Page
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Author’s Note
- Acknowledgements
- Excerpt
- One
She leaned in and kissed him, a gentle but loving kiss and her heart gave an extra thud. They still had a spark together and maybe Rosie had been right, Natalie had simply had to lose herself to find her way home.
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
When I began to write The Model Wife I had the strong feeling that something lurked in Natalie’s mind, an influence that she tried to ignore but came to realise had, at various times in her life, controlled her thoughts and actions. As I wrote the story this ‘thing’ manifested itself as an old book from almost a century before, full of advice for women.
Once I realised it was a book I tried to imagine what kind of advice would have been written on its pages for women in the early nineteen hundreds and I came up with a series of chapter headings. These headings were topics Natalie grappled with at various stages of the manuscript and were declarations such as
A Husband is Master. The model wife loves her husband truly, does not highlight his faults and provides for his every desire.
or
Family before all else. The model wife spends her time taking care of her family and putting them before her own needs.
I did some more research and eventually came up with my own little book to embed within this book. I called it The Model Wife and gave it this introduction:
The Model Wife by Mrs Gladys Norman, London, 1928
In my role as a surgeon’s wife I have managed a busy household, raised three children and maintained a healthy happy marriage. I feel it my bounden duty to offer the benefit of my wisdom and experience here in the pages of this book.
Mrs Gladys Norman, bless her heart, is a figment of my imagination, as is the book I created, but I tried to capture the tone and content of the original sources. Many of them sounded laughable and even cringeworthy to me living in the current day but of course they were based on the way lives of women were viewed at the time. All I can say is thank goodness times have changed… although scarily, even today some of those pervasive ideas linger.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements