Here is the powerful, deeply affecting story of one Margaret Mayfield, from her childhood in post-Civil War Missouri to California in the throes of World War II. When Margaret marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early at the age of twenty-seven, she narrowly avoids condemning herself to life as an old maid. Instead, knowing little about marriage and even less about her husband, she moves with Andrew to his naval base in California. Margaret stands by Andrew during tragedies both historical and personal, but as World War II approaches and the secrets of her husband’s scientific and academic past begin to surface, she is forced to reconsider the life she had so carefully constructed. 
 
A riveting and nuanced novel of marriage and family, Private Life reveals the mysteries of intimacy and the anonymity that endures even in lives lived side by side.

It was now past noon. The breeze had stiffened, and the air was colder than it looked in the sunshine. The steel of the handlebars communicated the chill into her hands, and her feet were growing numb. She could feel the ground right through her thin boots. 

The protagonist Margaret Mayfield Early bears witness to the aftermath of the American Civil War, the San Francisco earthquake, the First World War, anarchy, Pearl Harbor and the national paranoia that came afterwards, as well as the most important scientific advances. Margaret is more forward-looking than her domineering and misguided astronomer husband. As Margaret gradually comes to understand how she has been victimized by her own mother and her mother-in-law she also is able to retrieve her most important fugitive memory, of the hanging she had seen when she was less than five years old. With its ring structure, this is one of the few books I was eager to start all over again as soon as I had finished the last page.

You’ve always been a good girl, and now you’ve had a piece of luck, marrying at twenty-seven, but a wife only has to do as she’s told for the first year.” 

This book is no Middlemarch, but it is an excruciating portrait of a sterile marriage in the first half of the 20th century, between a too-timid woman with no other options, and a brilliant but increasingly deranged astronomer, Andrew.

“when Andrew talks to me about things, they make no sense. That’s the terrifying part. I know what I think, and then he tells me something, and what I think collapses into bits and pieces. That’s the kind of dread I mean.”

A Note About the Author 

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels as well as four works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2001 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006. She lives in northern California.