Mrs Bridge

Evan Connell has said the character of India Bridge is based on his mother.
His
mother was an eccentric woman named Ruth who, however, preferred to be called
"Elton". He said his mother was dying of cancer at the time the book was published
in 1959, and she never read the book. Connell, like the family in the story, grew
up in Kansas City.[1]
The eponymous character, India Bridge, is a wife and mother of three in a well-to-
do middle-class family in Kansas City. Her husband, Walter, is a lawyer who spends
most of his time at the office. Mrs. Bridge's life revolves around her children and
much of it plays out in the home and in and around the country club, in a social
environment whose primary values are "unity, sameness, consensus, centeredness".[2]
Her fears and anxieties are revealed through her actions rather than spelled out;
one moment of "inarticulate rage," as one reviewer called it,[3] occurs when her
son uses one of the guest towels: "'These towels are for guests,' said Mrs. Bridge,
and felt herself unaccountably on the verge of tears".[4] She is particularly
though vaguely disturbed by "her son's penchant for coming into the house through
the 'servants' entrance' rather than through the front door", since it forces her
into thinking about class. Though the 117 vignettes are chronologically organized,
from the 1920s to the early 1940s, there is not much in the way of plot, consistent
with Mrs. Bridge's life in which nothing dramatic seems to happen, and her first
name, "India", is indicative of the elusiveness of life and excitement: "It seemed
to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named
her".[3]
As the novel progresses it becomes clear that the elusiveness of the excitement
that could be associated with her first name is symptomatic, and Mrs. Bridge goes
from one almost-realization to the next. Her almost-realization of class difference
occurs when she is struck, in a bookshop, by a book called Theory of the Leisure
Class (a social critique of conspicuous consumption), a book she skims through and
is disquieted by. One of her friends, Gracie, asks her if she also feels sometimes
as if she is "all hollowed out in the back", a question Mrs. Bridge remembers only
when she hears that her friend has killed herself.[3]
Mr. Bridge, though longer since (according to one critic) his life is more
complicated, deals with the same "key moments".[3] Gerald Shapiro referred to this
as the "double exposure" of the two novels--"a curious double exposure, like a
photograph taken once in shadow, once in light."[5]
Reception and legacy

The novel has been somewhat neglected, overshadowed perhaps by the simultaneously
appearing debuts of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates. By 1962, when
critic Michael Robbins proclaimed that Mrs. Bridge answered the question asked by
writer and social critic, "what kind of people we are producing, what kinds of
lives we are leading", the novel was already out of print: readers of College
Composition and Communication were urged to write the publishers in hopes of
getting the book reprinted.[6] In 1982, when both Bridge books were republished,
Brooks Landon, in The Iowa Review, commented that "Connell seems to have become one
of those writers we know to respect but may not have read".[3] Writers and critics,
however few, continue to praise its sensitivity and importance; Tom Cox, in The
Guardian, writes that it is "one of the sharper novels about mid-20th-century
domestic life".[7]
Critic Mark Oppenheimer, writing in The Believer, called Mrs. Bridge one of
Connell's "three classics of Wasp repression" (the other two being the novels Mr.
Bridge and The Connoisseur).[8] American novelist James Patterson, who said Mrs.
Bridge was the one novel that probably influenced him the most (Joshua Ferris is
another admirer[7]), said it and Mr. Bridge "capture the sadness, and boredom, of
the unexamined life" and praises the compassion and precision of Connell's writing.
[9] British critic Matthew Dennison (who praised the "studiedly simple, undecorated
prose, with few rhetorical flourishes") compared the main character to Jan
Struther's Mrs. Miniver; both inhabit "an interwar world shaped by a promise of
certainties — domestic, social, cultural and sexual — which are never wholly
realised and remain frustratingly elusive".[10]
Publication history
Mrs. Bridge began as a short story, "The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge", published in
the Fall 1955 issues of The Paris Review.[11][12] Both Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge
were republished in the United States in 2005 by Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington,
D.C.[13] The fiftieth anniversary of the novel (in 2009) was celebrated with a
special edition of the novel, with photographs by Laurie Simmons and an
introduction by Mark Oppenheimer.[14]

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Evan Connell has said the character of India Bridge is based on his mother.

Reception and legacy

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