His Lovely Wife

by Elizabeth Dewberry

Book Overview

When tall, blond, and beautiful Ellen Baxter enters the Paris Ritz the day before Princess Diana dies, she's mistaken for Diana by the paparazzi. The next morning, as Ellen's older, Nobel-laureate husband attends a physics conference, she goes to the site of the fatal crash and finds an uncharacteristic photograph of Diana. Surprised by how deeply the death has affected her, Ellen pockets the photo. As she hears Diana's voice in her head and begins...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156032554
• ISBN13: 9780156032551
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

One darn good storyteller

Ellen Baxter happens upon the site of Princess Diana's death the morning after the fatal crash. There, she pockets an unusual photo of Diana left by a stranger. On her way back to her hotel, Ellen begins to hear the deceased Diana's voice in her head-and her life takes a turn. As she draws parallels between her own life and Diana's, she begins to question herself. As Ellen looks for meaning in her relationship with her older husband, a Nobel laureate in physics, and in her own life as "his lovely wife," she goes on a search for the man who took the photo of Diana. What follows is a surprising, affecting, cautionary tale of the role of beauty and celebrity in the lives of women. Elizabeth Dewberry's His Lovely Wife is a modern-day fairy tale set within the novel form. Through both flashbacks and telephone conversations, Dewberry touches on the complexities of mother-daughter relationships: Ellen and her mother, a former Miss Alabama, have a touch-and-go relationship much in need of forgiveness. Through Ellen's surprising emotions around the death of Princess Diana, Dewberry raises questions about the strange attraction of the lives of celebrities. And through it all, Dewberry manages to paint a portrait of a real woman, struggling with guilt and desires and trying to find her own place in the world. The book is alternately heartbreaking and funny, filled with a woman's reflections on beauty and physics, on photography and marriage, on responsibility and desires. In the end, Dewberry raises more questions than she answers, which lends the book an authenticity missing from many chick lit or women's novels. Dewberry said in an interview: "...when there is something that is really compelling and I have more questions than answers, that tells me that maybe a novel's there." Well, in the end of His Lovely Wife, Ellen Baxter's fate is uncertain, but we do know that she has faced some new truths. Somehow, though the story is quiet and the action mostly internal, His Lovely Wife is nearly impossible to put down. Armchair Interviews says: When you can't put a book down, that's a sign of a good storyteller at work.

Two hefty issues weaved into a brilliant tale

This review is for the Harcourt hardback edition, 2006, 282 pages. HIS LOVELY WIFE is the fourth novel by Elizabeth Dewberry. Beautiful Ellen has been married to Lawrence Baxter, a Nobel Prize winning physicist for fifteen years. As the sparks of love fade into distant memories, Ellen wonders if she has become a trophy wife for her famous husband. Their friends seem to think so. In August 1997, Lawrence and Ellen arrive at the Ritz hotel in Paris where paparazzi briefly mistake Ellen for Princess Diana. While jogging early the following morning, at the site of a recent automobile crash, Ellen happens upon Max Kafka, the handsome American photographer who took her picture the previous afternoon. In an aura of sexual tension, Ellen and Max walk to a makeshift memorial near the crash, which already has a few bouquets of flowers. Max leaves a small photograph there and bids Ellen goodbye. When Ellen examines the photograph, she realizes Princess Diana died in the crash. Shocked, Ellen thinks about Diana and communicates with her spirit. Ellen realizes there are haunting similarities between Princess Diana's life and her own. HIS LOVELY WIFE is a lyrical, literary journey into the perplexing role of the beautiful wife in the shadow of a famous husband and the nature of afterlife in terms of the theories of the universe. Ms. Dewberry weaves these two hefty issues together seamlessly in a brilliant tale.

An entertaining and profound read

Elizabeth Dewberry writes first-person fiction beautifully. This is an engrossing novel about a beatiful woman who is more intelligent and sensitive than she admits. Dewberry skillfully intertwines historical event, science, popular culture and women in a way that is both emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating.

Intellectually and emotionally engaging

Elizabeth Dewberry's novel reminds me of recent fiction by John Banville (this year's Booker Prize winner for The Sea). While painting a few dramatic days in the life of a lonely woman (unhappily married and obsessed with Princess Diana), she gives us quick glances at dreamscapes of eternity...her touch is very light, but the ideas here are profound. Dewberry is also a good stylist, funny and lyrical. The writing never calls attention to itself.

"Ultimately being Miss Anything is just a step on the way to being a better Miss Anything"

Essentially a story about the place of women in the world, their lives, loves and their passions, His Lovely Wife is also a tale of the importance of beauty and the nature of yearning. The lovely thirty-something Ellen Baxter finds herself in Paris on the morning before the tragic car accident that killed Princess Diana. Ellen's scientist husband Lawrence is attending a prestigious physics conference and both are staying at the Ritz. One morning, the paparazzi - the same group who chase Diana to her death - mistake Ellen for the famous Princess and later she spies the woman while she's having her hair done in the hotel salon. Although Ellen has never thought much about Diana, she admires the woman's penchant for beauty, fame and fortune. Her discovery that it really was Diana in that car, under that bridge, throws her into a maelstrom of confusion and self-doubt, particularly when Diana's spirit begins to talk to her. As Diana's voice becomes louder, Ellen also obsesses over Max Kafka, a photographer who put the picture of the Princess on a memorial by the site of the accident. She decides to hunt him down, not because she wants to interrogate him about his involvement, but because she feels strangely drawn to him, her feelings for him somehow tied to her feelings for Diana. Ellen is unhappy in her marriage and she's the first to confess that she doesn't have a single marketable skill, except that she's "good with people, and loves charities." Her mother, a former Miss Alabama, with her singing ventriloquist act, instilled in her from an early age that life is a pageant, "It's one big long beauty contest and the girl who gets the best husband wins." Consequently, Ellen now approaching middle age has found herself as a sort of "trophy wife" to a brilliant and talented man, who cares little about her emotional well being and ignores her efforts to achieve some semblance of independence. Everything is just so frenetic for Ellen with everything rushing towards an end: "the summer, the century, the millennium, Diana" - there's also something else coming to an end that she just can't articulate - perhaps it's her marriage to Lawrence. Like Diana, Ellen has spent so much of her adult life trying to figure out what she was doing on the planet and she doesn't think she ever feels like she's finding the answer. It's only when Diana comes to her and tells her she doesn't regret a single act of love, that Ellen can make sense of her own desires. Author Elizabeth Dewberry cleverly uses Ellen's predicament - and her reaction to Diana's death - to cast a protracted eye on the human condition, and the choices that people make and then regret. The themes are wide and far reaching: The nature of adoration - Diana chose men who gave her what she wanted, and then she did all her charity work to compensate, because she still wanted to deserve it. And the ability to connect - Ellen discerns that we are all intimately connected to the universe in ways we can