The trial hits John hard, leading to his “days of dread … when everything that had been dignified, rationalized, was made gross and tawdry, was torn down and trawled through the gutter.” When the book is published, John and Henry can only wait to see how the establishment reacts. If he were to be discovered in a public lavatory, or in some kind of brothel, all would be lost.”Ĭomplicating matters is the trial of Oscar Wilde, who is currently being prosecuted for “gross indecency” for his own encounters with men. Henry, meanwhile, has misgivings of his own: “Addington was almost certainly an invert. I am dying of it.” John’s wife knows nothing about the book he has told her that he is working on an autobiography.
I have grown sick on middle-class propriety. Catherine, your daughters, would not escape the stain.” But the author is undeterred, responding, “I feel myself a fraud. John is warned by a friend against the idea: “Your career would be ruined. It was a prototype for changed relations between men and women, uncorrupted by sexual expectation.” Neither Henry nor Edith are attracted to each other, but they married to make a point: “They had made a union more serious and sustained than that which existed between many of the married couples they knew.
Henry is straight, but uninterested in conventional intercourse Edith has taken up with another woman. Henry is also married to a fellow intellectual named Edith both are members of a social reformist group called the Society of the New Life. This becomes harder when John moves his younger lover, Frank, a working-class typesetter, into their home. His wife, Catherine, knows his secret, but the pair, who have three adult daughters, have decided to stay together, with John’s sexuality lingering in the background, rarely discussed.
The two men have led vastly different lives: John married on the advice of physicians, who told him the union would cure his homosexuality. Crewe’s novel follows John, a successful author and translator, and Henry Ellis, an intellectual who trained as a physician.
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