Margaret Forster: GOOD WIVES?

BY PAT BASKETT

The question of whether a wife is good or not seems anachronistic and loaded - surely these days only a man would ask it? But this is Margaret Forster and her credentials to do so are impeccable: eight books of non-fiction, several of which examine the lives of women, and 19 of fiction.

We pick this one up and, lulled by her warm prose, lose ourselves yet again in the domestic lives of women - Mary, wife of the African missionary-explorer David Livingstone; writer Robert Louis Stevenson's Fanny; and Jennie Lee who married the English politician Nye Bevan.

Mary and Fanny are the key to this book's interest. One's heart bleeds for Mary Livingstone, so much the good wife it probably killed her.

Born on a mission station 900km north of Cape Town, south of the Kalahari Desert, she was better prepared than many women for the rigours involved, trailing after her husband in oxen carts through the wilds with children.

But what woman would leave her 18-month-old baby, along with her other three children, in Scotland and return to Africa on the orders of her husband?

No wonder she began to drink and lost her faith. The amazing thing is that she seems to have loved her husband and was bereft without him. She died aged 41 in 1862 on the Zambesi river.

It's interesting how much these lives tell us about the husbands.

Stevenson sounds like a honey and Fanny was as devoted to him as Mary was to Livingstone. But she was a gutsy, unconventional American who married at 17, then left her first husband and took her three children to Paris where she studied art and met the consumptive Robert.

She devoted herself to his care for the remaining 14 years of his life, as well as reading and criticising his manuscripts and writing stories of her own. The search for a climate conducive to Robert's health took them to Samoa where Fanny flourished and they established the house in which Stevenson died in 1894.

The life of English Labour politician Jennie Lee (1904-1988) can't match either Mary or Fanny for interest, and although it's nice of her to share it with us, neither do Forster's interspersed reflections on her 40 years as wife of English journalist Hunter Davies.

Were these women good wives? The answer, Forster tells us, depends on women's status and their expectations and these have changed in the past 150 years.

That's hardly an earth-shattering observation. I found her analysis unoriginal and her references to the Anglican church's litany slightly irrelevant in these days of secular partnerships.

By the end of the book the question had become rather one of why do women continue to go through the marriage ceremony. Her conclusion: simply because of an emotional commitment, and because marriage safeguards the interests of children.

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.

* Chatto & Windus $69.95