The Tortoise and the Hare

‘”It’s an art, some people have it,” Evelyn had said. I must be dreaming! she thought wildly. It could not be! A woman without looks, without – but Paul had said: “Are you sure you know what men fall in love with?”‘

The magnetic Evelyn Gresham, fifty-two, is a KC of considerable distinction. He has everything life could offer – a gracious riverside house in Berkshire, a beautiful grey-eyed wife Imogen, devoted to him and to their eleven-year-old son, a replica of his father. Their nearest neighbour is Blanche Silcox, a plain, tweed-wearing woman of fifty who rides, shoots, fishes, and drives a Rolls Royce – in every way the opposite of the domestic, loving Imogen. Their world is conventional country life at its most idyllic: how can its gentle surfaces be disturbed?

This exquisite novel tells a love story with a difference as it subtly demonstrates that in affairs of the heart the race is not necessarily to the swift – or the fair.

Elizabeth Jenkins, the distinguished biographer (of Jane Austen, Lady Caroline Lamb and Elizabeth I), historian and novelist, lives in Hampstead, London; she was awarded the OBE in 1981. The Tortoise and the Hare, her sixth novel, first published in 1953, is generally considered her greatest work of fiction.