Mothers & Daughters in mid-century

The Winds of Heaven / Monica Dickens
Penguin, 1963, c1955.
239 p.

Now this is a sad story if ever I've read one. Louise is a widow; in her late-fifties, she is considered 'old' in this story - I had to check on her age again because she seems older in her dependence on others and inability to shift for herself. After her useless husband dies and leaves her penniless, she has to rely on her three adult daughters, who all seem to see her as a nuisance, mostly.

She moves around from daughter to daughter, staying a few weeks here, a few weeks there, and spends most of her winter with an old friend in her coastal hotel.

But this year is different; her friend has a serious accident, and she and the other older ladies at the hotel are turfed out that same day to make room for paying guests. In confusion, Louise heads back to London to try to find a place to land.

One daughter is on holiday with her family, one is out of town, and the other lives on a farm and is pregnant and doesn't want her -- though Louise's sympatico son-in-law Frank does, and comes up with a solution to find a place for "Granny" where she can be homed but also out of everyone's hair. He has a friend with a caravan, which they park on the farm, and Louise moves in.

She's delighted; though tiny, it's all her own, it's a nest she can creep into and not feel like a burden. Also, her awkward granddaughter Ellen can stay with her there instead of going along on sporty family holidays. This is wonderful for both of them, until a day when Something happens and it's not so wonderful any more. 

In the end, Louise is saved only by the deus ex machina move of her London acquaintance, a bed salesman named Gordon Disher, who proposes, and in the process tells off her three selfish daughters all in one go. It's rather satisfying. 

I found this book both intriguing and confusing. Louise seems so old -- were women in their late fifties really senior citizens in 1955? And her daughters are so cold. I know that all mother-daughter relationships are not perfect, but Louise seems like a gentle woman who has spent her life putting up with a boorish husband and doing everything for these girls. Perhaps some turnabout, girls? 

The style is brisk and descriptive, focusing on these characters and the inexorable results of their neglect. It's just that it seemed a little bit over the top to me, in some ways, and really full of disagreeable people. I can't say that I really enjoyed this picture of depressing family life, even if it is by an author I really want to like but haven't yet warmed to. 


A Favourite of the Gods / Sybille Bedford  
London: Virago, 1984, c1963.
322 p.

This was an odd book: feeling like it begins in the era of Henry James with Anna, an American heiress who marries an Italian prince and can't live with his philandering; moving to Constanza, their daughter, a more free-spirited girl who grows up in England with her mother after they've left Italy and her father; and continuing on to Flavia, Constanza's very modern English daughter. 

Most of this book focuses on Constanza, though, and her place in this family. Her feelings about her mother, her father, her short-term English aristo husband, and her own daughter are examined, though she's rather a cold and emotionless creature. Or rather, she fits into that upper class style of living in which one does things on a whim, and doesn't really care much about emotional connection whether between spouses, or parents and children. 

At one point, Constanza and Flavia get off a train in Europe en route from Italy due to a search for a missing ruby ring - and they end up staying in that small railway town for years. Their decisions seem to made on the spur off the moment - as another reviewer noted, they all seem to be wealthy, frivolous characters who have very little to recommend them to the reader's interest. 

And I think that was the primary difficulty I had with this book - I couldn't connect at all. While it was clearly set in the early part of the 20th century, it felt jarring to read the modern references. All these women seem to be acting from social norms that are old and outdated (except for perhaps Flavia, but we see little of her). I felt discombobulated by the story, uncertain where it was going or why I should care anyhow. At times, there were reflections which caught me, but overall this is not going to be a favourite. 

The women don't seem to have much fondness for one another; poor Anna gets the stink eye from her family for her moral stance once she leaves her husband. Both the other characters and the author herself seem to think she's being ridiculous and unworldly by not just going along with the Italian lifestyle she found herself dropped in to. And the selfish and narrow-focused Constanza is beautiful and elegant and all that. Maternal feelings seem in short supply in this book, and equally so any daughterly fidelity. If you want a story about brittle women focused on status and money and their own personal beauty, comfort and satisfaction, then perhaps you will find this one more to your liking than I did.