"Empowered Wives... Plus-2" brings us three books of female-led fantasy on the subject of marital role-reversal.
First up is "A Female-Led Marriage", Gillian Ormendroyd's semi-autobiographical classic describing how a wife, if clever enough, can persuade her man into the arrangement her title suggests without losing the respect of friends, family, and colleagues... And put the new regime in place for good... Read on as Ms Ormendroyd gives a blow-by-blow description of what it takes for an independent woman to not only be in control of her own life but to become a figure of command and authority to the man she loves and knows will be all the better under her supervision... Even if he might not always see it that way!
Next up is "An Evil Awakening", as Estelle Marchant takes us to 1922 where, for one wife, a life of being second best is about to end. This after her husband returns from a business trip to the East for the company he owns with an illness that has left him with the strength of a child while leaving his faculties intact... The hapless husband's situation not improved any when his wife takes on a Polish woman to help with him and she soon becomes domestically indispensable to the wife and a figure of authority to the demoted husband as his regression deepens... And looks likely to become far worse!
We complete the triad with Rafael Menton's "The Empowered Wife", his tale of how yet another wife and mother exploits her husband's inability to find employment after redundancy to forge a career for herself that makes her the breadwinner for the first time. A redundancy with still worse consequences for the husband when his wife's new female boss, and soon-to-be mentor, plants the idea in her head of kick-starting her marriage in a new and female-led form... The same form, in fact, her boss has insisted upon in her own marriage... A marriage in which her boss and mentor totally rules the roost!
Believable fantasy and female-led fiction from a psychological perspective, for those readers with a preference for exercising the darker side of their imaginations with the help of believable and character-driven plotlines.
