Miranda has drifted her entire life: from her parents’ home to university, from university into marriage and motherhood, and, while on vacation in rural Italy, into a strange and destructive affair. She comes completely unmoored, taking wild emotional swings as events overtake her, hurtling toward an inevitable and horrific ending.
If Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady were filmed, it would have to be as the sort of horror of manners typified by Speak No Evil or The Invitation: Miranda allows herself to be carried along by events, seemingly incapable of making her own decisions, unable to see that not making a decision is a sort of decision in itself. Her mental state is dictated entirely by the whims of others, swinging wildly from moment to moment. Its shape is almost perfectly a classical tragedy, except that Miranda’s particular tragic flaws seem not to have any balancing strength.
Brooke’s prose sparkles, particularly in her descriptions of the Italian landscape and the characters Miranda encounters. The pace is slow, but not plodding — it’s a trainwreck-in-the-making that draws us along in its steady, inescapable certainty.
