Chronicling the decline and fall of a Kansas City housewife, Evan S Connell’s 1959 novel is a gentle social satire that describes a life of unreflective comfort and bourgeois luxury, bounded by dinners at the country club and the faded social conventions to which its heroine clings as articles of faith. From all sides come threats to the fortress of her normalcy: odd gifts from an inscrutable relative arrive like portents of a disordered wider world, while as her children grow, their insistent modernity drives her to petty acts of retribution that are cruel and comic in equal measure.
Mrs Bridge is tireless in her resistance, yet everywhere there are signs of unease: “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale – the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?” asks her friend Grace before swallowing 50 sleeping pills. Though she lacks the perspicacity to reply, Mrs Bridge is aware that the question concerns the “carbuncular presence” she senses – a lurking torpor which it becomes her life’s work to ignore.
Mrs Bridge is a thoroughgoing critique of the unexamined life, and a valuable precursor to the generation of novels that sought to diagnose the central malady of mid-century American life: what Richard Yates later called “a lust for conformity… a desperate clinging to safety and security at any price”.

• The subheading of this article was amended on 9 June 2022 to remove a reference to the novel being about a “1950s Kansas City housewife”. It was published it 1959, but the events take place between the two world wars.