The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble

Emma, a young wife and mother living in London at the end of the Swinging Sixties, has been offered an exciting job - she is to be one of the first female newsreaders. Intelligent and attractive, with a passion for facts and a mild yearning for notoriety, she can't wait. But then her husband David, an egocentric actor, demands that she accompany him to Herefordshire for a season at a provincial theatre festival. Faced with seven months of rural tedium, Emma begins to look elsewhere for entertainment, and finds her eyes settling on producer Wyndham.