A Sensible Life was published by Bantam Press in 1990, by which time Wesley (at seventy-seven) was one of Britain’s bestselling novelists — a remarkable late career that produced ten novels between ages seventy and ninety. This novel is quieter than her earlier work but perhaps more devastating: it examines what happens when a woman makes all the “sensible” choices and discovers at the end that sense is not the same as life.
Flora is ten years old in 1926, holidaying with her parents in southern France — parents who don’t like her and make no effort to conceal it. She watches a young man (Cosmo) swimming and falls in love — not with childish infatuation but with a clarity that will prove permanent. The holiday ends; Flora carries her love into a “sensible” life: education, marriage (to a suitable man she does not love), career, widowhood.
The novel follows Flora through the decades — each encounter with Cosmo (or with people connected to him) measured against the intensity of that initial vision. Wesley’s argument is not that Flora should have acted (she was a child; circumstances never aligned) but that the unlived passion is as real as the lived one — that a love carried silently for fifty years has as much substance as one consummated in a week.
The ending — which brings Flora and Cosmo together in old age — is both satisfying and melancholy: what is gained is gained too late to be fully used, but the novel insists that “too late” is better than “never,” and that a sensible life can still contain moments of transcendence.
Collecting A Sensible Life
First edition (Bantam Press, London, 1990): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Signed first edition: $20–$50