A Wife's Duty: A Tale

There is no killing like that which kills the heart. Helen Pendarves knows this truth too well. Married to the respectable but dull Seymour Pendarves, she basks in the reflected glow of her family's triumph while her spirit withers beneath the weight of duty. Before the wedding, she loved Ferdinand De Walden with the wildness of genuine passion. Now she must learn to love a man she never chose, in a house full of his friends and expectations, while the ghost of her real heart haunts every corridor. Amelia Opie, writing in the twilight of her remarkable career, crafts a quiet devastation here, not the drama of bigamy or scandal, but something far more insidious: the slow suffocation of a woman who has done everything society demanded and still finds herself starving. This is domestic tragedy at its most precise, showing how duty can become a cage built from one's own consent. For readers who understand that some prisons have no locks, that some deaths leave no body, this 1847 novel remains piercingly modern in its portrayal of emotional attrition.