He Fell in Love with his Wife Annotated

He Fell in Love with His Wife is the story of James Holcroft, a recently widowed farmer who needs a woman to keep house for him and help him in his dairy. The servants he hires are uniformly awful, and after he finds one of them throwing a party for her friends at his expense, he almost decides to sell his farm. But he's lived there all his life, and he loves it, so he's willing to do almost anything to keep it.Holcroft's neighbor, Lemuel Weeks, suggests that a respectable housekeeper might be the answer, and offers as a candidate his wife's cousin Mrs. Mumpson. Holcroft hires her on a three-month trial basis, but he soon discovers that he's been tricked: Mrs. Mumpson is neither willing to work or capable of working, and she quickly develops the notion that he's going to fall in love with her and marry her. That's so far from being the case that Holcroft actually daydreams about horse-whipping Weeks for tricking him into hiring her.