I’m delighted that Avon are reprinting Every Woman for Herself, because I have to admit it’s still my favourite literary child – and it’s obviously a favourite with readers, too, since not long ago they voted it one of the top three best romantic novels of the last fifty years, a great honour.

I haven’t rewritten it, merely tweaked a couple of errors into shape, brushed its hair and made sure it had a clean handkerchief, so since it was first published by Piatkus in 2002, it’s obviously very much of its time. But then, think how relaxing it will be to visit a remote Yorkshire valley with no phone signal for miles and only a dodgy dial-up internet connection. The Brontë family managed quite well without them and I hope you will too.

Happy reading, everyone!

Trisha Ashley

Chapter 1: Alien Husbandry: 2001

Got up at the crack of dawn to kill the Fatted Breakfast before driving Matt to the airport, only to discover that aliens had stolen my husband during the night and substituted something incomprehensibly vile in his place.

I expect their replicator was having a bad day. I distinctly remembered marrying a gentle, long-haired, poetry-spouting Jason King lookalike with a social conscience, but what was facing me over the breakfast table was a truculent middle-aged businessman, paunchy, greying, and flaunting a Frank Zappa moustache seemingly edged with egg yolk: but I knew better. The alien snot was the clincher.

It was not a pretty sight, but fascinating for all that.

I went to peer into the kitchen mirror to see if I’d changed as well: but no, I still looked like a miniature Morticia Addams.

‘Charlie,’ the Matt creature said impatiently, ‘did you hear what I said? About wanting a divorce?’

I certainly had; what did he think had ripped the veils of delusion from my eyes? But I was temporarily deprived of speech as almost a quarter of a century of married life flashed before my eyes in Hogarthian vignettes: Flake’s Progress.

The inner film came to a jerky halt. ‘Yes,’ I said finally, nodding. I understood.

Unfortunately my memory was not of the selective kind, a cheery sundial remembering only the happy hours, so my recollections were freely punctuated with

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TRISHA ASHLEY Every Woman For Herself

Dedication

Foreword

Chapter 1: Alien Husbandry: 2001

TRISHA ASHLEY

Every Woman For Herself