The Secret Wife
Its 1961 in the outer suburbs of Sydney. Edith Devine moves into a new home with her two daughters and husband, Charlie. As a result, she stumbles into an unlikely friendship with the striking Frankie Heyman, who lives in the bright yellow house next door with her two sons and pugnacious husband, Ralph. This playful and incisive domestic drama conducts a moving exploration of life behind closed doors in the ´60s.
The bulk of the book is tautly narrated from the point of view of Edith, who is anxious, demure, and pious. Edith witnesses Frankie’s pedantic and overbearing husband, Ralph, exhibit controlling behaviours that drive her to seek out employment as a model in secrecy. Edith, who is captivated by Frankie’s beauty, strength, and vivacity, volunteers to spend her days maintaining Frankie’s home and becomes the eponymous ‘secret wife’. As we follow Edith, and her relationship with the extravagant Frankie deepens, we are privy to Edith’s journey of self-deception as she tries to maintain this fraught situation at the centre of this compelling novel.
Lamprell’s characters are well-drawn, and the level of detail attributed to these women’s experiences is impressive and convincing. Edith’s belief that her life moves in tandem with world events—like the assassination of Kennedy, or the explosion of the Hindenburg—makes the book feel slightly removed from its Australian context. There is a generous amount of plot movement, with one shock in particular that is bound to catch you off-guard. The prose is concise and somewhat cinematic. The nuanced construction of two intriguing and overlapping family formations will move you both intellectually and emotionally. I found this work to be a literary page-turner that I suspect will appeal to fans of Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Trilogy.
