The Perfect Wife: Restored Classics to Go Edition

Phyllis Bottome (1884–1963) was a British novelist and short story writer of Anglo-American parentage, born in Kent, England, to an American clergyman father and an English mother. She spent part of her childhood in the United States before returning to England, where illness—including a bout of tuberculosis contracted in her youth—shaped much of her early adult life and drew her toward extended stays in European sanatoriums, experiences that fed into her lifelong habit of travel and observation. She began writing early, publishing her first novel while still a teenager, and went on to become one of the more prolific literary voices of her generation. Bottome's fiction often explored the psychological and social pressures facing women within rigid or authoritarian structures, an interest deepened after she and her husband, diplomat Alban Ernan Forbes-Dennis, settled for a time in Vienna, where she became a devoted student of psychologist Alfred Adler and later wrote his biography. In the 1920s the couple also founded a school in Kitzbühel, Austria, whose students included a young Ian Fleming. Her best-known novel, a 1937 work confronting the rise of Nazism in Germany, brought her international attention and was adapted into a successful Hollywood film, cementing her reputation as a writer engaged with the political urgencies of her time.