The Good Husband

Prolific and renowned author Gail Godwin’s novel The Good Husband (1994) is an examination of two marriages that come apart, and of the four people in those marriages who end up coming together in a variety of ways. The novel centers on the long, terminal illness of an academic star whose orbit is occupied by her serenely patient caretaker husband and a young book editor interested in gleaning her wisdom. As the editor’s own marriage disintegrates, she finds solace in the dying woman’s strength and in the arms of her widower.

The best way to summarize the novel is to describe each of its four characters in turn. In the text, each narrates his or her own experience, so readers often see the same events from multiple points of view.

When she was a young graduate student, Magda Danvers blew the academic world away when her dissertation on visionary poets was published as a book that became a phenomenon before even being accepted for her degree. Magda rose meteorically through the ranks in academia, relying on a mixture of superb intellect, fierce self-promotion, and charming charisma.



When the novel opens, Magda is fifty-eight years old and dying of untreatable ovarian cancer. Though housebound, she is still the same witty, analytical, and ever-curious person she has always been. Her sickbed attracts a bevy of academic visitors who come to pay their respects, kiss up, swap gossip, and sometimes learn from her insightful outlook on life. Magda remains unflinching in the face of her disease, calling her ovarian cancer things like “my Gargoyle,” and “my last teacher.” For her, the illness is her “Final Examination” and the unglamorous bodily ungluing that it comes with is the “Great Uncouth.”

Surprisingly, Magda ended up marrying someone her colleagues didn’t see as a peer: Francis Lake, an unambitious mild-mannered seminarian, who gave up the priesthood for her and has spent his entire life as Magda’s helpmeet and househusband. Francis, who is twelve years younger than Magda, remains devoted and committed throughout Magda’s illness. He has never wanted anything other than to support his indomitable wife, and her illness is the ultimate proof of his selfless love – he is the “good husband” of the novel’s title.

One of the people who come to visit Magda is Alice Henry, a young woman whose life has been filled with senseless loss and tragedy. In her teenage years, her parents and brother died in an accident; later, the aunt who raised her also passed away; and just before the beginning of the novel, Alice’s baby was stillborn, suffocated by its own umbilical cord during delivery. Alice finds some measure of comfort from getting to know Magda and from seeing the connection she and Francis have. Alice’s relationship with Magda also provides her with an escape from her own crumbling marriage.



Alice’s soon to be ex-husband, Hugo Henry, is a novelist who is sixteen years older than she is. He and Alice met when she became his literary editor, and she now wonders whether she was actually more in love with his writing than with him. Her edits turned Hugo’s flawed but promising novel into a critically acclaimed success, prompting him to propose. However, after the stillbirth, Alice finds herself detesting Hugo and resenting their marriage. She doesn’t believe that Hugo is truly grieving the loss of their baby (despite the fact that we know he is broken by it from his own narration).

For his part, on top of trying to deal with his mourning, Hugo is battling writer’s block, trying to figure out what went wrong between him and Alice, and getting over the shock of finding out that his son from a previous marriage is gay.

The more time Alice spends with Magda and Francis, the more she heals from her losses and the more she realizes that she is falling in love with Francis. Seeing this, Magda allows Alice to admit that she can no longer be with Hugo, even going so far as to sort of gift Francis to Alice as a death bequest.



After Magda’s death, Francis must grapple with the fact that the purpose of his life now seems to be over. He slowly blossoms and opens up as he finds within himself a “self” he never really knew was there. Part of this self-discovery is his new relationship with Alice.

Hugo gracefully lets Alice go, and in the process of admitting that their marriage has run its course, he finds that he can once again start to write.

The novel was released to generally favorable reviews, but several critics mentioned that what was truly lacking was the evidence of Magda being the extraordinary person that we are told she was. As Richard Eder wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “We are told of the splendor of a figure whose physical and stylistic flamboyance suggests an American Germaine Greer, and also of her internal hesitancies and failures. We see the other characters impressed by the splendor. But we don’t see the splendor itself.”