Love is a book about the relationship between Catherine, a woman a couple years older than I am, and Christopher, a man in his mid-20s. To further complicate things, Catherine is a widow with a daughter, aged 19, whose husband is Catherine's age (in fact, a year older) and is a minister. And her daughter is pregnant -- about to make Catherine a grandmother. The first half of this book, which follows Catherine and Christopher's courtship, is a comedy of manners. Christopher is a persistent, insistent admirer, who seems to have no care for Catherine's age. Even when she tells him she has an adult daughter, he's not put off. His attention and affection rejuvenate her, after a decade of never being seen as a woman independent of her role as a mother. Following her daughter's marriage, she's become even more inconsequential as she's been forced to relocate to her late husband's London apartment, while her daughter and her husband move into the family estate. With Christopher, she finds a new enjoyment of life, and a youth she never experienced in her own youth, thanks to the fact that she also had married a much older man when she was quite young. After a misunderstanding leads Catherine's son-in-law to believe she's having sexual relationship with Christopher, he pressures them to marry with the threat of not allowing Catherine to see her daughter otherwise. Christopher is thrilled and Catherine accepts it as a necessity in order to see her daughter, and decides she loves Christopher besides. Up through this moment, Love is hilarious. But in the second half of the book, things take a darker turn. Catherine feels herself aging and becomes preoccupied with the fear that Christopher will one day wake up and see her as she really is (or as she really sees herself) -- a tired, old woman. I had mixed feelings through much of the second half, and particularly bristling was the suggestion that Catherine really had aged so much -- perhaps because she was just a couple years older than me (though I'm not a widowed mother, to be fair). But then things took a totally unexpected turn in the last few chapters, and I actually found myself loving the way the book ended -- though it was a long way from the lighthearted first half.
Love was evidently loosely based on a real relationship that Elizabeth von Arnim had when she was in her 50s (a decade older than Catherine) with a man in his early 20s. I'm not sure why, but I've always find myself oddly drawn to traditional-gender-swapped May-December relationships. But reading this makes them sounds a bit heartbreaking. Do women, already under disproportionate pressure to maintain beauty and youth, in this circumstance apply that pressure to themselves doubly to keep the interest of a young partner?
