“Her performance as a contented wife was consummately good,” observes Nicky, a young writer in 1960s London, of Phyllis, the middle-aged suburban housewife at the heart of Tessa Hadley’s new novel. Phyllis’s conjugal harmony collapses when she abandons her husband Roger and two children, Colette and Hugh, to live with Nicky, and embarks on a sexual transformation.
Free Love is signature Hadley, as she charts the battle that rages within Phyllis between the expectations of her class and gender and the “space that had been unfulfilled in her passionate nature.” Told in delightful prose—trees are “upright inky pen strokes”; a staircase is a “coiled spring”—Phyllis’s story is one of awakening to the politics of the decade, as Nicky questions her views on the Vietnam War. Through a new friendship with a Grenadian nurse, Phyllis also witnesses the racism of the era.
Still, Free Love remains a deeply domestic novel—the nervous excitement of teenage Collette’s first trip to the pub is rendered as carefully as a conversation about the evils of western capitalism; the quietly heartbreaking transformation of Hugh into a brittly confident public schoolboy shapes Phyllis’s psyche more than her time at marches.
Though a prize-winning author, Hadley’s career has never quite taken off. Perhaps she is a victim of her own consistency, each of her novels so beautifully written that she is perpetually judged against her own very high standards. Though maybe not the best of Hadley’s eight novels, by any other measure, Free Love is a triumph.
