The Circle

by Elaine Feinstein

Lena's seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle.

An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

Genres: Fiction

156 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 1970

About the author

Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as an editor for Cambridge University Press (1960-62), as Lecturer in English at Bishop's Stortford Training College (1963-6), as Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Essex (1967-70), and as a journalist.

She has contributed to many periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement, and was formerly Writer in Residence for the British Council in Singapore and Tromsø, Norway.

Of Russian-Jewish ancestry, she has been influenced by Russian writers, especially Marina Tsvetayeva and Anna Akhmatova.

She is the author of a number of plays for television and radio and several biographies, including singer Bessie Smith, writer D. H. Lawrence, Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and Anna Akhmatova.

Reviews

[Marie Gui · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly dense, aching, and beautiful. Took me a tiny bit to adjust to the style at the start (owing, I imagine, to Feinstein’s poetic inclination, as someone who doesn’t read poetry very often) but once I did, The Circle’s microuniverse of detail and nuance was really able to shine through. An intimate — at times painfully so — portrait of a marriage and of a woman’s (the protagonist’s) separate inner life within that relationship, and overall a very special little gem of a book I’m glad to have stumbled upon by chance.