Jane Studdock is clearly deeply confused at the beginning of the book in her effort to avoid being thought of as “little wifey”—and who wants to be thought of as little wifey? Fairy Hardcastle calls her that.

But she doesn’t want to be identified with what she would think of as stereotypes, but which are actually archetypes, having to do with womanhood and being wife or mother, etc. She is an intellectual, she is writing her dissertation on John Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and yet poor Jane is a Gnostic without knowing it. She hasn’t got a clue about the vindication of the body. She doesn’t know that her body will turn out to be virtually Mark’s salvation, not just because he remembers her with lust or concupiscence in the toils of Belbury, but because it is her womanhood that stands with clarity and truth and good sense and resilience and toughness over against the bottomless deception and disintegration that is Belbury.

It is Jane embodied, not just the idea of Jane, not just Jane’s intellect—far from it—but Jane as his spousethat saves Mark. And, of course, the very last paragraph of the book is, in one sense, the beginning. We have now come up to the real beginning of the marriage. Mark is about to be saved. He has escaped hell, and Jane is to be his salvation.

Thomas Howard, in an interview in Touchstone Magazine entitled ‘The Catholic Angler’.