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First published in 1971, Margaret Drabble's novel The Waterfall was celebrated as "a strong modern conception of the concept of body and soul -- an exploration of the physicality that engulfs human life." The heroine is a highborn young woman who so fears her own sexuality that she enters into marriage with a working-class intellectual to whom sex is unimportant (or so he says). Even so, the girl becomes pregnant, whereupon her husband, unable to withstand his wife's remonstrations, walks out on her. Having cast off her carnal fears, the heroine launches a torrid affair with her cousin's husband, a reckless auto racer. The tragic consequences of this fling were ably dramatized in the four-part TV adaptation of The Waterfall, which aired in Britain in 1980.