Washington Irving’s ‘The Wife’ Enters the Book Market

According to a reporter from the Iran Book News Agency (IBNA), the short story ‘The Wife’ holds a special place in Washington Irving’s collection of stories. It emphasizes that while buying a woman’s precious love with kindness and affection is easy, betraying that love with weariness, disloyalty, or infidelity should not be easy. Similarly, a woman’s respect for a man is praised not for his wealth, but for his honor and love.

Washington Irving was a writer of short stories, essays, history, and biographies. Today, he is considered among the great pioneering writers of 19th-century American classical literature, known for masterfully blending plot, philosophy, and thought into life’s experiences. He is also regarded as one of the major founders of independent American fictional literature.

An excerpt from ‘The Wife’ reads: “But truly, no couple in the world can ever resolve to walk on a path full of roses before the true time they deserve, nor can any marriage ever offer the true wine of contentment to any man or woman without passing through the furnace of trials and when its time has come.”

The story continues: “Yes, things continued in this manner until some time later my friend Leslie encountered misfortune because, despite investing all his assets in a major profitable venture and even postponing his definitive wedding ceremony for a few months, a series of ominous, unexpected events robbed him of all his possessions, and after some time he found himself in the depths of poverty and destitution; so much so that he could only remain on his feet as before for a short time, but after a while his strength began to wane, and now his entire being was nothing but a broken heart and an embodied, endless suffering! And what made his situation worse during this time was the effort spent concealing the matter of his bankruptcy from Mary and smiling at her, lest she get a whiff of his misfortune, for he did not deem it right to inform his wife of the misery of his fate…”

Chehrzad Publications recently released this book, translated by Behnam Chehrzad, in 48 pages for 170,000 Tomans.