It was the moment Adele's fans had waited six years for. At last, following on from the monumental success of 25 - the first album ever to sell over three million copies in a week - she had released a sample of her next one. The Easy On Me video clip lasted just 21 seconds, but the beautiful, plangentResounding and soulful. The word comes from a Latin verb meaning to lament.   piano intro made one thing clear: there was a treat coming in November.

The clip, which has been viewed 15 million times, also carries some strong symbolism. It shows Adele driving along a country road in an open-top car pulling a trailer laden with furniture. As she stretches out her arm to feel the breeze, sheet music blows out of the window, leaving a trail behind her. Everything points to the fact that she is leaving the past behind her and starting a new lifeAdele is now in a relationship with Rich Paul, an American sports agent..

The idea that this is a reinvented Adele is supported by her appearance in this month's Vogue. She features on the cover of both the British and the American editions - the first time any woman has been honoured in this way. After the attentions of stylists, make-up artists and personal trainersAdele works out two or three times a day with the object of "becoming strong and giving myself as much time every day without my phone"., she is almost unrecognisable as the face of past album covers.

She has also given the magazine her first interview in six years. In it, she explains how she cut loose from her marriage to Simon Konecki, the founder of the charity Drop4DropA charity which gives deprived communities access to clean water. and the father of her eight-year-old son Angelo.

There was no unpleasant falling-out: "It just wasn't right for me any more. I didn't want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn't miserable miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first."

Angelo, she says, is bewildered by what has happened, though his father has bought a house across the road from them in Los Angeles to make things easier. "Angelo's just like, 'I don't get it.' I don't really get it either. There are rules that are made up in society of what happens and doesn't happen in marriage and after marriage, but I'm a very complex person."

The new album, 30, was made very much with Angelo in mind. "I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he's in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness. It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that's a real wound for me that I don't know if I'll ever be able to heal."

The Daily Mail journalist Sarah Vine, who is in her fifties, has saluted Adele for being so forthright: "Wow, I thought. Now there's a novel concept. A woman not trying to make excuses for putting herself first."

For her own generation, Vine explains: "The idea that you would not just put up and shut up, that you would in any way feel yourself entitled to a degree of happiness, of self-fulfilment, is, in many respects, wholly alien."

Instead, she says, women have tended to lose sight of their ambitions and identities because they give so much of their time and energy to looking after their families. Adele is an example of "what any woman can be if she just has the courage to trust in herself. To say, without guilt or embarrassment, 'What do I want?' And to just go out and get it."

Some say, yes. For far too long women have been drudges, failing to follow their dreams because they devote their lives to others and soldiering on in unhappy marriages for the sake of their children. Adele is right to put herself and her art first. Her success in coming from a deprived background and turning herself into a superstar through talent and hard work should be an inspiration to anyone.

Others argue that Adele has been extraordinarily selfish. We have a duty to others which is more important than our own happiness. As someone whose parents split up when she was two, and who had a terrible relationship with her father, she must have known the damage Angelo was likely to suffer. Saying she is a "complex person" and writing beautiful songs about it does not excuse her behaviour.