The author is a self-confessed mistress and her self-imposed task (doubtless due to all that time on her hands) is to explore, nay rationalise, why some women live in relationships with men who are supposed to be "faithful" to someone else. This earnest tome sounds the strongest death knell imaginable for the notion of mistress as viable option for the Millennium woman.
Victoria Griffin says she doesn't expect to be congratulated for what she has "revealed" because, she claims, people like her frighten those who live by conventional codes of behaviour: "One needs to be brave consciously and deliberately to live and love at odds with society, open to censure by the respectable. " What a glorious piece of self-delusion that sentence reveals. There's nothing remotely brave or shocking nowadays about a single woman having a terminally tedious affair with a married man. In reality it's an entirely self-imposed limitation, carefully constructed to avoid commitment to one's own emotional development - fine if you know that's what you're doing, irritating in the extreme if, as it appears, you don't. It's all very well to cite a pair of 12th century lovers as inspiration for a wholly self-justifying exercise, but at least Abelard and Heloise have a wicked Uncle (hers) on their side. This jealous chap had Abelard castrated, which may have cast a pall on proceedings. Sans nuptials, the lovers retire to separate cloisters and end up being buried side by side, always romantic in terms of posterity.
To be fair to Griffin, she does use the occasion to delve into the nature of what she calls "clerical concubinage", pointing out that it was only in 1123 the First Lateran Council decreed that those in major orders could no longer marry. To illustrate her thesis - or at least support her own position - Griffin trawls the social history of womankind and succeeds in stuffing her work with fascinating, half-digested research into the notion and nature of mistresses through the ages.
However, I fail to sympathise with Jean Rhys, Rebecca West or Sarah Keays, because the men - Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells and Cecil Parkinson - were totally oblivious to anyone's feelings but their own, and why did the gals not see that? Is it that most modern mistresses have a bit of the masochist in them - a notion Griffin raises briefly but fails to develop? It's demonstrably true, of course, that until relatively recently women's choices in matters of the heart were severely circumscribed. But there's no need nowadays for a single woman to be part of a tortuous triangle unless she wants to be, and that in turn suggests a singular failure of the imagination. Or as D. H. Lawrence put it once: "We have made a great mess of love since we made an Ideal out of it". Not to mention the mess we've made confusing High Romance with Recreational Sex.
How could Griffin's editor let her away with putting the remarkable 16th century Diane de Poitiers in the same bed as the unspeakable Monica Lewinsky? Cheap shot, Griffin. De Poitiers played an essential role in the continuing stability of the French monarchy at a time when women of her calibre were indeed the power behind the throne. Henri d'Orleans remained her steadfast lover all his life. Nineteen years his senior, she not only endorsed his marriage to Catherine de Medici but, when the Queen had problems conceiving, it was Diane who gave her practical advice. Thanks to the mistress's great common sense, the Queen did eventually conceive and carried on doing so for years thereafter.
Pretty ungrateful, then, of Catherine to deny de Poitiers access to the King when he was dying and begged to see her, but as the old Jewish proverb has it, no favour goes unpunished. Of course it must have rankled - Diane and Henri upstairs in bed, from which the mistress would dispatch him to do his duty with the wife. And there's the rub. To truly appreciate the threat - or, to use that dread modern term, the challenge - that a mistress poses, you do in the end have to be a wife. Yes, Griffin quotes all the major thinkers on the subject but only from a dull, safe distance. She herself has chosen to live out a limiting experience and frankly I'd rather be me. My dear, dead daddy taught me that in the end where women are concerned it's not what men say that counts - it's what they do. Or as Griffin puts it in one of her more lucid moments: "love is demonstrated in what the lover does for the beloved, and the nature of illicit relationships means that they very often exist in no social context at all." If so, then, heavens, what on earth is their point?
Jeananne Crowley is an actress currently appearing in An Ideal Husband at the Gate Theatre in Dublin