Does a wife exist only when her husband is contemplating her? A wife is called into being only by a husband: therefore does she cease to exist when he stops observing her, stops regarding her? Elinor abruptly leaves her husband and goes to France, to the village of Severac-le-Chateau. There she ponders the lives of other women. In the seventeenth century a wife is murdered for faithlessness: in the early twentieth century a woman embroiders sheets for a trousseau never needed; in the 1980’s a successful pediatrician may or may not know what her husband is up to. Elinor’s process of transformation – from a wife to a self – is a journey of mind, body and spirit.