Cakes and Ale

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Cakes and Ale

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The story is told by a first-person narrator and well-to-do author, William Ashenden, who, at the beginning of the novel is suddenly and unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, a busy-body literary figure in London who has been asked by the second Mrs. Driffield to write the biography of her deceased husband, Edward Driffield. Driffield, once scorned for his realist representation of late-Victorian, working-class characters, had in his later years become lionised by scholars of English letters. The second Mrs. Driffield, a nurse to the ailing Edward after his first wife left him, is known for her propriety and interest in augmenting and cementing her husband's literary reputation. Her only identity is that as caretaker to her husband in life and to his reputation in death. It is well known, however, that Driffield wrote his best novels while married to his first wife and muse, Rosie.

Amy Driffield requests that Alroy Kear write the biography of her late husband. Kear, who is trying to prove his own literary worth, jumps at the opportunity to ride the coat-tails of the great Edward Driffield. It is Kear, knowing that William Ashenden had a long acquaintanceship with the Driffields as a young man and as a young writer, who contacts Ashenden to get privy information about Edward's past – including information about his first wife who has been oddly erased from the official narrative of Edward's genius.

The plot revolves around how much information the narrator will divulge to Driffield's second wife and Kear (while exposing it all to the reader), who ostensibly wants a "complete" picture of the famous author, but who routinely glosses over the untoward stories that might upset Driffield's surviving wife. It is William Ashenden who holds the key to the deep mystery of love, and the act of love, in the life of each character as he recounts a fascinating literary history of creativity, infidelity and literary memory.