The Afterlife of Dinah Brooke

Photo Credit: Matt Hood

Dinah Brooke is in her early nineties; she’s never heard of a “trad-wife.” When I begin describing the phenomenon, she shakes her head in the Zoom window.

“ I’m beginning to see how incredibly hard it is for women today, actually,” she says. “I have a friend who lives in America and does research there, and she was horrified by the sorts of things that women are doing. Like, you know, shaving their pubes and having their labia changed in order to please men.”

Modern perversions aside, Brooke is no stranger to the depraved demands of patriarchy. Her debut novel, Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady, first published in 1971, follows a young, sheltered British housewife named Miranda collapsing under the weight of husband and child in a rented summer villa in Tuscany. When her husband (a nebbishy American actor named Louis) flies out to London for a weeklong shoot, Miranda is left baking under the hot, unforgiving sun, alone with the baby she seems to fear and resent. Alone, that is, until the handsome Italian Oreste shows up and draws her into a passionate, ill-fated affair.