Secret Love

Miles Franklin winning author Alex Miller's A Brief Affair (2022) was given to me as a gift for Christmas that year and has been on my to-be-read pile ever since. In an effort to read what I have before acquiring more, I grabbed this book off my shelf and read it over a couple evenings. 

  

From the outside, Dr Frances Egan has a perfect life. In her early forties, Frances lives on a semi-rural property outside Melbourne with her carpenter husband Tom and two children. She is on track to becoming a full professor at a Melbourne University, where she serves as Head of the School of Management at a regional campus. But Frances is discontented inside, feeling unfulfilled in her life and sensing that she may have missed opportunities along the way. On a work trip to Hefei China she does something completely out of character, and has a brief affair with a man she will never see again. Returning home she has changed, her mind often drifting back to the hotel room with her lover. Her children and husband have noticed this change in her and are unsure what to make of the woman who returned from this trip.

The office where Frances works is in a grand building that was once an asylum. The academic offices are in the cells which once held the unfortunate inmates. Frances feels a presence in Cell 16 and when she comes into possession of a diary belonging to Valerie Sommers, a resident of that room decades before, she feels an instant connection. As she reads Valerie's diary, and learns of her forbidden love for Jessie, Frances becomes obsessed with knowing what happened to her. 

Miller has crafted a fully formed character in Frances Egan. She is conflicted personally about her role as wife and mother. At work she faces bullying from her boss and undermining from her peers. She feels invisible to those around her, and her husband's adorations ('you are perfect') are dismissed as though he doesn't really see her. Egan cannot see herself and the ways in which she is an agent of what is happening in her life.

This is a slow, subtle book, meandering in unexpected ways. I never really knew where this story was going, and was just immersed in the moment. I found Valerie's story particularly fascinating and would have liked to know more about her. Indeed in some respects a more interesting novel lies within Valerie's tale....

I also appreciated the way Miller portrayed the treatment of mental health, through locating part of the story at a former institution. I understand he based his institution on the  Sunbury Lunatic Asylum which was used to house mentally ill patients from 1879 to the 1980s. In the 1990s it was taken over by Victoria University and used as a campus until 2011. 

Overall, this was a hopeful novel about the interior life of an ordinary woman by a master writer. 

Miller won the Miles Franklin Award for The Ancestor Game (1993) and Journey to Stone Country (2003).