The Journal of Mrs. Pepys: Portrait of a Marriage
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31st December 1659 I have resolved to keep a journal, and it will be private. I shall keep it hidden, and it will be mine alone and I shall say whatever I like. So that on days and nights like this it will be company of a sort.... So begins the journal of Elizabeth Pepys, wife of the celebrated diarist Samuel. Theirs is a love match, marred only by their failure to have a child and their struggle for advancement from a state of poverty. But Sam's star is rising and their prosperity increases, only for their relationship almost to founder because of his infidelities.... This is a story of a passionate, if pain-fraught marriage, of a gloriously rich and robust period in our history and a woman's passage through the defining years of her life in which her search to draw significance from her existence is punctuated by the everyday urgencies of living. At times jauntily acerbic, at others movingly elegiac, this is a portrait of a tumultuous relationship and era that, in its sharp-edged concerns and emotions, is utterly compelling.
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Elizabeth Pepys decides to keep a journal of her private thoughts as well as a record of her activities and the activities of those around her in the year 1659 in London, and this is that story.
She marries young, and theirs is a marriage of both intense love and searing pain. Her husband, Sam, is, at times, passionate and cooly indifferent, and she, a woman of that time, is subject to his whims.
It is through Elizabeth's eyes that we see the events of the day including the London Fire and the Great Plague as well as the clothing fashions and the food preferences and the scandals of the time.
I'd love to read the book author Sara George relied on in writing this book, The Diary of Samuel Pepys.
