Faber & Faber

An exploration of the loneliness of marriage, Elaine Feinstein's 1970 novel The Circle was acclaimed on publication and now, 40 years later, is a contender for the Lost Booker Prize. To coincide, as the book is reintroduced to a new audience, the author provides a little background.

'This is a novel written while I was living in a Georgian house in Brighton - which my husband and I could not afford to maintain - and commuting to Colchester where I was an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Essex.

It is a story about a marriage under stress, told in fragments of memory which lodge like shrapnel. Lena has tried to find her own way - as a whole generation of women have not - but the cost has been high. The family home is messy, every post brings bills, and most painful of all, her children suffer from the lack of domestic structure. We see the world she has created sharply through their eyes.

It is a novel about many kinds of betrayal. When Lena discovers her husband is sleeping with the au pair, he assuages his guilt by making her feel inadequate. Most of the women in the novel, one way or another, are dependent on the opinion of their men. They are often ashamed of their own ambitions, or wait for the telephone to ring. These are not yet days of consciousness-raising groups.

Lena cannot want to be like them, yet she finds, when her two boys are lost in a freak snowstorm on their way home from school, it is an "ordinary woman" who has seen their distress and takes them in.

The Circle is my first novel, written after a group of my poems had been published in Faber Introduction 1, and sharing the same intensity.'

-- Elaine Feinstein, February 2010

Click here for more on the 'lost' Booker Prize.