Mrs. Bridge

Mrs. Bridge is an upper-middle-class married woman in the 30s and 40s living in the Midwest. This book is the story of her life, revealed in little bits and pieces, tiny moments of a life. Mrs. Bridge marries a man who works all the time in a law office and has three children who quickly develop their own interests and lives and a housekeeper who takes care of all the cooking and cleaning and organizing in the home. Mrs. Bridge lives a small life, a life where she has everything she has ever wanted and yet feels deeply dissatisfied.

Mrs. Bridges recalls a time when she became engrossed in a book she found in the attic. “...she had come upon a passage which had been underlined...which observed that some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain; and this passage she had read once again, and brooded over it, and turned back to it again, and was thinking deeply when she was interrupted.” She wonders later why she never returned to this book that had caught her attention so completely.

I love the way this book was written, in little short chapters, little scenes from Mrs. Bridge's life. Each little chapter is like a Zen story, a little piece of a life that zings the reader like a tiny dart. Recommended.

Note: The original publishing date was 1959, and Mrs. Bridge and the other characters in the story are very much products of their time, with all the prejudices of their time and social class.