This book bothered me for a lot of reasons that weren't its fault, so let me first say it's a lovely, somewhat slow-moving book that never felt slow-moving.

It bothered me that it's somehow, by virtue of I'm-not-exactly-certain-what, escaped the SF classification. I'm not giving anything away here when I tell you there's a time traveller in this book. How is that not speculative fiction? The laws of physics have been altered. I'm a fan of SF, and it annoys me no end that there's an idea that if a book is good enough, it must not be SF anymore, creating an SF ghetto.

However, perhaps it has escaped classification as SF simply because the central driving conflict of this book wasn't about the limits of possibility or humanity at the edge, but merely about fate and choice, an old theme that one doesn't really need to invoke SF to explore. Despite its time-travelling shenanigans, the book seems to argue that one can only discover the future one day at a time, and really things are best that way. In fact, the book's ending is easily guessed at in the second chapter, and yet the book still gently unfolds its way to the inevitable as if it were a mystery.

Additionally, this book annoyed me for its title. Recently I read (and have lost track of where, but never mind) someone's irritation at the fact that there are countless books titled along the theme The XXXX's Wife, but seemingly none named XXXX's husband. Although the book takes turns with its narrative point of view, switching from Claire to Henry and back again, Claire's life seems so subsumed in Henry's that in the rare cases where a scene told in Claire's pov doesn't have Henry present, it is generally still about Henry. The book explicitly compares her to Penelope of The Odyssey, and indeed, Claire is always waiting for her husband, it seems, or rejoicing at his return. This bothered me most when Henry dies, and although Claire's refusal to move on from him is explicitly treated as harmful to her in the text, the narrative nonetheless skips from her mourning, directly to the end of her life when time-travelling Henry returns to her from a time before his death, and then the book ends. Claire exists only as the time-traveller's wife, never as her own woman.

When I was quite young, I read far too many Victorian novels. One of the plots that recurred was that of the young isolated girl in the guardianship of a man. Because this was Victorian, he was never really in anything that modern readers would read as a father-role. He appeared, entertained and delighted her, and then mysteriously disappeared; all actual child-rearing was done by domestics, naturally. The girl would grow up worshipping and looking up to him, waiting for his visits when he would bring her presents, pass judgement on her academic accomplishments, and tell her about the world. Generally, at about the age the whole thing began to look really skeevy there would be a prolonged separation, usually against the girl's will, where the girl would go out and discover the world. Then she would meet her protector again, this time "as a woman!" and now their love can be acknowledged/acted upon. This book comes far too close to that plot for my comfort, although it does, at least, explicitly acknowledge what the Victorians seemed unaware of.