H.E. Bates Companion

In his response to the Sunday Express's invitation to "writers of renown to analyse the green-eyed monster," Bates relates the case of friends of his, a highly successful painter and his wife, living "in the country," whose spinster neighbor has experienced for two decades of extreme jealousy, "the victim...of the most irrational, powerful, subterranean, perhaps the most common, of impulses." He claims that "woman needs man with such fundamental urgency that every other woman...is a potential rival...In her blood, not knowing it, she is terrified that the body of man, without which she cannot reproduce her kind, will somehow be lost to her." Bates then addresses the criticism that his "stories are so often concerned with the tragedies of unfulfilment. Yet the central tragedy of life appears to me incontestably to be lack of love. The child that turns to the parent that cannot or will not give affection is recognised now, as the type behind almost every delinquent, every maladjusted malingerer who is jealous of stability, law, and the fruits of success." In the Sunday Express (London, August 16, 1953, p. 2).