middle-aged growth replaces self-absorption in Alex Miller's A Brief Affair
- Written by: Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
One of the most famous meditations in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is on the symbol of the pier-glass:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.
Eliot’s parable describes the way our sense of our own importance and value is only relative – a matter of perception. In other words, we are all the protagonists of our own lives, but it would be both naïve and arrogant to presume we are central to anyone else’s life story.
Review: A Brief Affair – Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
Alex Miller’s latest novel explores this concept through a narrative of middle-aged growth: a transition from self-absorption and isolation, to generosity and friendship.
A Brief Affair is the story of Dr Frances Egan, head of the School of Management at the regional campus of an Australian university. She leads a charmed life:
she’s already got everything. A lovely home and a family and a successful career.
It’s disrupted by one night of passion with an international colleague, while on a work trip to China.
Unhappy, unfaithful women
In one sense, the novel operates in the tradition of narratives of unhappy, unfaithful women: Madame Bovary (1856), The Awakening (1899), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), The Bride Stripped Bare (2003). Like the women in those novels, Frances thinks this moment of romantic freedom gives her agency and autonomy; that it offers her, as a harried wife, mother and employee, “something of her own”.
Alex Miller’s novel operates in the tradition of narratives of unhappy, unfaithful women.
Author provided
An authentic life
Frances’s reflections on the “brief affair” of the title demonstrate her personal evolution. For much of the novel, she thinks of her co-conspirator as her “Mongolian warrior”, reducing both him and China, where the one-night affair took place, to a romanticised, highly simplified Orientalist Other – existing only to give meaning to her own experience.
The publisher’s tagline describes A Brief Affair as a novel about “love’s power to change us”. But it’s not her romantic affair that changes Frances: indeed, there is no direct consequence for her infidelity. Rather, France’s gesture towards growth lies in her slow realisation that the most powerful instances of love in her life come from friendship, the commitment of her marriage, and an evolving relationship with her growing children.
Love, in other words, can be found by moving outside the individualist attitude Frances displays in all aspects of her life.
A Brief Affair is a quiet novel, focused on just one life. But in its emphasis on the ways we might each construct our own story – while respecting the stories of others around us – it has a profound impact.
Authors: Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland 
