Collect Patience Presented By John Coates Issued As Textbook

many ways, surprisingly modern, "Then who wants you tenderly I dont know, Whom you talk to, whom you love, whom you laugh with, Who gossips and quarrels and teases and laughs, Who satisfies you. All those things. The daily loving comfort of it all, "

What an intriguing little book! Under the guise of a comedy, John Coates gives us a thoughtprovoking novel dealing with the concept of marriage from both the male and female perspective, and of catholicism.
We follow our heroine of the title who for all instances and purposes is happily married withlittle children, The reality is however very different!

Patience, being incredibly naive and ignorant, is submissive in all things to her husband, meeting all his demands dutifully, even in the bedroom where she gets no pleasure nor expects to have any, having been taught by her catholic mother that the act is only for procreation.
Edward treats her like a child or rather a pretty object, not deigning to really talk to her or spend time with his children since they are not boys.
Things change

however when Patience finds out her husband has a mistress why would any woman want to sleep with him if they didn't have to, and that she has been quite ignorant on many grounds, such as sexual love.
Her awakenings are presented in such a frank and tasteful manner that no one reading this will be offended, most novels nowadays being a lot more explicit.
No, the important element here is not the treatment but rather that the author brought to the fore the issue of women's fulfilment in a marital relationship and all that this involves.
Considering that this was written in thes by a man, it is groundbreaking,

Catholicism is present but mostly for the notion of Sin and what this means, Patience is not what I would call a devout religious person, not like her brother who also treats her in a patronising way, but rather one who has been brought up in this tradition and who therefore follows it.
Throughout the novel, she learns and reevaluates her whole world several times, often in a very comical fashion, in terms of what she believes is right and wrong, and how this applies to her and her children's happiness.


This is a charming little book, often whimsical and naive, that entertains while fighting for women's rights and true conjugal relationships,

"As the door shut behind him Patience knelt down and waited to be sick, And she couldn't, as usual, help thinking that if Catholic women weren't on their knees for one reason, they were probably on them for another.
"
A reread for me now, I thought it even funnier than when I first read it, Oates managed to capture his female characters in a very realistic way, It discusses Patience's beliefs many times, but always in a lighthearted manner, The main character's optimism in all the situations made me smile, A heartwarming book which will make you have a giggling fit by times,

Do buy books at Persephone Books, They will have a hard time when Brexit hits, This is.rather than just two, I read it overdays as it did keep the pages turning but more so because I kept waiting for a bit of oomph and for the characters to stop with the dialogue! The last chapter was definitely the best.
A basic narrative to conclude the story with no dialogue, I got sick of quotation marks! The story is interesting, It seems quite spicy for the time it was written, which was rather surprising, An ok book that would definitely appeal to some, Thats the best I can say for it, No summary of the plot of this book can give even an inkling of its charm, Patience is a strict Catholic who has produceddaughters in less thanyears of marriage to Edward, an older man chosen for her by her mother even though he is not a Catholic.
The novel starts when Patience's repressed brother Lionel informs her that Edward has a mistress, On the rebound from this shattering revelation, Patience sleeps with a penniless musician, Philip, with whom she has her first orgasm ever, Discovering all at once what love and sex are all about, Patience decides to get rid of Edward and make a life with Philip, a daunting prospect for an observing Catholic.
However, when ransacking Edward's desk for evidence of his affair, she finds proof that his first wife is still alive, Therefore, although Edward was legally divorced when he married her, in the eyes of the Catholic Church he should not have married her, There is never any doubt of where this fairytale is going: of course Patience finds true happiness after managing to push Edward in the arms of his mistress without him suspecting that she has a lover of her own.
What makes this novel utterly delightful to read is the author's lightness of touch, Patience's sexual awakening and gradual reconciliation of her religion with her newly gained agency are described with gentle humor, Patience gets wise to the ways of men without losing anything of her sweetness and innocence in the best sense of the word, In the end, although she reassesses a number of the tenets of her religion, she keeps her faith in a loving God intact, Deceptively simple and in an odd way timeless, What a powerful indictment of religion's singular ability to impede us from being fully human, from experiencing our freedom and the joy of incarnation.
The protagonist, Patience, is surprised by her sudden ability to experience human love in an otherwise comfortable but passionless life, She deems its pursuit to be worth the possible scorn of family and friends, She is fortunate to have a sister who had provided a model for self realization and the financial means to facilitate a new life.


Patience doesn't precisely lose her Catholic faith, but rather "in the meaning of innocence and virginity and Sin and in the importance of behaving as she was meant to behave.
" In so doing, she becomes more fully herself, which is what we are all meant to do in the short time allotted us, I picked this book up in London and couldn't have been more pleased, The protagonist is positively endearing and her stream of thought is charming, The book also has a delightful balance between innocence even naiveté and romantic intimacy refreshing perspective that the two aren't mutually exclusive, If you can get your hands on Patience, it's a fun little read, Delightful. But a bit boggy in the middle, . . If I had a penny for every time I got into a book thinking its going to be a love story and it turned to be about Catholicism, Id have two pennies, which isnt much but its still weird it happened that many times.
The first time was The End of the Affair, in case youre curious,

Patience is a book about faith, sex and selfdiscovery, These three things are indelibly linked as only sex, faith and selfdiscovery could be, The titles Patience is a woman in her thirties married to the most quintessential bore, One evening she goes with her sister and brotherinlaw, meets a man, falls in love, and sleeps with him, As a result, she awakens to the fact that intimacy is actually a good thing and that her husband treats her like an object rather than a person and to top it all, hes not even good in bed.


Unfortunately, Patience is catholic and lives in thes, so divorce is out of the question, Thankfully, the story gives her a very handy way out, Patience rides all over her husband to live her happily ever after with her children and a man who loves her, The whole book is a humorous vindication against all thoseth century novels which placed adultery as an almost inevitable consequence of marriage, Here the adultery is solved neatly, Patience gets revenge on her husband, whos held accountable for having neglected her, Although Patience is naïve to the point of absurdity, and nice to the point of improbability, she is never the butt of the joke.
It is the husband who is made ridiculous, The ending is a tribute to optimism, to the charming idea that it is never too late to live a happy life even when you were born to be as catholic housewife.
Patienceyears old, and already the mother of three daughters is an obedient and submissive wife in the uppermiddle English style, She defers to her husband Edward and Nanny, and has a generalised wellbeing due mostly to her own beauty and wealth, her happiness in her small children and an ability to take pleasure in small things.
She rarely has a serious or analytical thought, and is more or less wafting through life when she stumbles upon evidence that her husband Edward not only has a mistress but even more inconveniently, a first wife who is still alive.
As Patience is a practicing Catholic, the presence of this wife seems to indicate that her own marriage is invalid, When Patience falls in love with Philip, a concert pianist, the situation devolves into a bit of a muddle, Having just experienced love and lust for the first time, Patience is both losing her innocence and becoming more worldly in the sense of managing men, Sin and the strictures of the Catholic church.


The tone of this novel is drawingroom comedy: light, arch, satirical, The protagonist is a birdbrained wellbroughtup girl who is perhaps not as dumb as she seems, It all moves along at a fast clip, and was hugely readable, but didn't make much of an impression on me, Perhaps I read it in the wrong mood, but it just seemed a bit silly, .