The Little House (novel)

After four years of marriage, Ruth and Patrick Cleary, a young English couple, visit Patrick's parents in Bath. Having been orphaned as a child, Ruth feels isolated and alone in the oppressive, close-knit Cleary family, and her husband seems unaware of her discomfort. She has always longed for a family of her own, and in the early days of their marriage believed she had found it with Patrick, but now, caught up in his career as a journalist, Patrick seems distant and distracted from his wife's concerns. On an impulse, Patrick buys a cottage near his parents' isolated manor house and sells the apartment his wife has made her home. After the move, Ruth loses her job and, though she had not intended to become a mother, she falls pregnant. After the birth of her child, she suffers post-natal depression, and Patrick's mother Elizabeth, the domineering matriarch of the Cleary family, begins to take over Ruth's role as mother and homemaker. Having been manipulated by her mother-in-law into a stay at a "rest home", Ruth is so medicated she can barely function, but she rallies, and finally wrests control of her life in a final Gothic twist.