Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift (Simon & Schuster, £12.99
Misselthwaite Manor, Howards End, Blandings, Brideshead, Bly—no homes are more revisited than those we find in books. From Ben Jonson’s poem “To Penshurst” (1616), his celebration of the Sidney family’s ancestral pile, to Alan Hollinghurst’s “Two Acres,” the seat of the Sawles in his novel The Stranger’s Child (2011), the country house forms the bricks and mortar of the English canon.
A house in the country is not the same thing as a country house. A house is composed of a roof, windows and walls but the country house in literature is an idea, a state of consciousness, a system of values, an arrangement of space. In his story of the same name, Henry James called it “The Great Good Place” but, he said, “we may really call it, for that matter, anything in the world we like—the thing for instance we love it most for being.”
And love it we most certainly do. When Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945, it had been impossible, wrote Evelyn Waugh, to predict “the present cult of the English country house.” Every writer worth their salt now counts a country house novel among their oeuvre: Sarah Waters has The Little Stranger, Toby Litt has Finding Myself. Ned Beauman’s debut, Boxer, Beetle (2010) pays tribute, he says, to “the three finest country house novels ever written: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” The country house novel is always paying tribute to the literary past, just as the historical past is usually the setting of the country house novel.
In her Cazalet Chronicle series, Elizabeth Jane Howard gives us Home Place, the Sussex base of the Cazalet clan. The aim of the saga, Howard said, was to explore “the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women.” The watchwords here are “English life” and “change.”
The country house novel is a narrative hold-all, a device that allows the incongruous to congregate, tensions to build, secrets to spill and all hell to be let loose. The house is a miniature town where only the middle and upper classes are visible, and all-seeing servants usually glide about like ghosts. It might, like Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, be the place in which we become our best selves. Alternatively, like the ruined abbeys of the Gothic novel, it is where we confront our worst selves. It is where Englishness can be bottled and preserved—“It has been my privilege,” says Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day, “to see the best of England over the years… within these very walls”—but it is also, as the setting for detective fiction, the place where order breaks down.
The genre allows us to inhabit a world of interiors in which upstairs and downstairs are zones divided by a cordon sanitaire. We are more alert to the tensions of the corners, cupboards and corridors in the fictional country house than to the spaces in our own habitats. As a teenage reader, the spooky chest in Catherine Morland’s bedroom in Austen’s Northanger Abbey thrilled me far more than the spooky chest in my own bedroom, while the closed doors of Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall filled me with more anticipation than any other doors I had known.
The fictional country house is composed of boundaries and rules, and there are few more electrifying transgressions than the one in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), where the second Mrs de Winter, creeping around her predecessor’s old bedroom in the west wing at Manderley, sniffs Rebecca’s nightdress and strokes her lingerie. “Do you think she can see us?” wonders the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?”
That takes us to the heart of our pleasure in the genre: the country house novel turns us all into what Graham Swift calls “innocent thieves.” In Mothering Sunday, Swift’s new novel and his own foray into the genre, there is a great deal of crossing between zones—domestic, generic, sexual and psychological. In brief and lacerating prose, Swift strips the genre bare: the exterior of Upleigh, his novel’s country house, remains undescribed, while the interior is for the most part uninhabited. Except that is in the book’s central scene, when a post-coital maid wanders through the rooms wearing nothing but a Dutch cap.
The novel is set on 30th March 1924—Mothering Sunday—when the nation’s mothers are still grieving for the sons they have lost in the Great War. The tone is elegiac, but the lament is less for the certainties of social hierarchy than the innocence of pre-lapsarian bliss. Jane Fairchild, a servant, is having an affair with Paul Sheringham, a master. He initially paid her for sex but soon mutual interest cancelled the need for purchase.
Illicit sex is a staple of country house fiction, but it is striking how often a consciousness is violated by seeing something it does not understand. What do Miles and Flora know, the feverish governess wonders in James’s The Turn of the Screw? In Atonement, 13-year-old Briony Tallis walks in on the housekeeper’s son with her sister in the library and reads their passion as rape. When Cathy Earnshaw, in Wuthering Heights, returns from her visit to Thrushcross Grange she is mysteriously translated from childlike purity to self-conscious womanhood, leaving Heathcliff vowing revenge on the house.
In Mothering Sunday, the Nivens of Beechwood, where Jane Fairchild is a maid, have lost both their boys, while the Sheringhams, who live in neighbouring Upleigh, have only 23-year-old Paul left, and he’ll be dead by lunchtime. It being Mothering Sunday, the servants at both houses have been freed for the day. With no mother to visit, Jane plans on reading in the garden. She likes boys’ adventure stories because, as she puts it, she likes “reading across a divide.” She also likes the thought “that life itself might be an adventure,” filled with “mental hazarding.” Today she has chosen Youth: a Narrative and Two Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad, which begins, “This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”
Mothering Sunday begins with an act of penetration, so to speak. Instead of reading, Jane sneaks round to see Paul who is alone in Upleigh, and they make love in his bed. She has never before entered a house by the front door (“as if she were a real visitor and he a head footman”), or been in Paul’s bedroom, with its triple-mirrored dressing table and gold-and-cream striped armchair, or lain naked, a trickle of “seed” sliding down her legs while he, in his “surly nakedness,” dresses to meet his fiancée for lunch at the Swan Hotel at Bollingford. There would be a stain on the sheets, Jane thought, but for another maid to deal with. This is “an upside-down day” when the rules no longer apply.
This is also an upside-down novel, a bold interpenetration of country house and sea stories set in the sepia of a Sunday-morning sexual langour with, as its centre of consciousness, a servant girl concerned with her vaginal discharge.
Paul had left her in bed when he went to have lunch. She would have asked him not to go, but this kind of exchange was “disqualified from the upper world in which such dramas were staged.” Like Conrad, Jane Fairchild is an outsider. But today Paul has “bestowed” on her, “for her amusement,” his palace. “She might ransack it if she wished. All hers.” Crossing the threshold, she wanders the empty rooms as naked as Eve, her bare flesh conferring “on her not just invisibility but an exemption from fact.”
She visits Paul’s dressing room, with its amalgam of choices—the privilege of his class: “what will it be today? Who shall I be today?” She pads down the carpeted stairs, where “the hall seemed to tense at her approach. Objects might have scuttled and retreated. They had never witnessed anything like this before.” She takes in the pictures. Paintings were “for maids to study… as they dusted the frames and cleaned the glass.” The drawing room was like “a small deserted foreign country,” but it is the library that she enters most cautiously. This was the room in Beechwood in which “she felt like some welcome, innocent thief.”
Jane’s adventure, when she crosses the divide, reads like one of those dreams in which we go to work without our clothes on. Rarely does fiction invite such intense identification, such mental hazarding. Swift strips his reader bare. Our tension is born of familiarity: we too have done this. Not naked perhaps, but invisible enough to be exempted from fact. Poking around in other people’s houses is our national obsession. We do it when we flick through Hello! or World of Interiors, when we watch Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey. This is what we are doing when we read country house novels, which describe and, more importantly, re-enact the thrill of being in a room belonging to someone of a finer class.
But, thinks Jane, turning the pages, “Sailing ships? Conrad was… already behind the times.” Country houses—and maids, come to that—are also, by 1924, behind the times. And what is a sinking ship, if not a floating country house?
Misselthwaite Manor, Howards End, Blandings, Brideshead, Bly—no homes are more revisited than those we find in books. From Ben Jonson’s poem “To Penshurst” (1616), his celebration of the Sidney family’s ancestral pile, to Alan Hollinghurst’s “Two Acres,” the seat of the Sawles in his novel The Stranger’s Child (2011), the country house forms the bricks and mortar of the English canon.
A house in the country is not the same thing as a country house. A house is composed of a roof, windows and walls but the country house in literature is an idea, a state of consciousness, a system of values, an arrangement of space. In his story of the same name, Henry James called it “The Great Good Place” but, he said, “we may really call it, for that matter, anything in the world we like—the thing for instance we love it most for being.”
And love it we most certainly do. When Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945, it had been impossible, wrote Evelyn Waugh, to predict “the present cult of the English country house.” Every writer worth their salt now counts a country house novel among their oeuvre: Sarah Waters has The Little Stranger, Toby Litt has Finding Myself. Ned Beauman’s debut, Boxer, Beetle (2010) pays tribute, he says, to “the three finest country house novels ever written: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” The country house novel is always paying tribute to the literary past, just as the historical past is usually the setting of the country house novel.
In her Cazalet Chronicle series, Elizabeth Jane Howard gives us Home Place, the Sussex base of the Cazalet clan. The aim of the saga, Howard said, was to explore “the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women.” The watchwords here are “English life” and “change.”
The country house novel is a narrative hold-all, a device that allows the incongruous to congregate, tensions to build, secrets to spill and all hell to be let loose. The house is a miniature town where only the middle and upper classes are visible, and all-seeing servants usually glide about like ghosts. It might, like Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, be the place in which we become our best selves. Alternatively, like the ruined abbeys of the Gothic novel, it is where we confront our worst selves. It is where Englishness can be bottled and preserved—“It has been my privilege,” says Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day, “to see the best of England over the years… within these very walls”—but it is also, as the setting for detective fiction, the place where order breaks down.
The genre allows us to inhabit a world of interiors in which upstairs and downstairs are zones divided by a cordon sanitaire. We are more alert to the tensions of the corners, cupboards and corridors in the fictional country house than to the spaces in our own habitats. As a teenage reader, the spooky chest in Catherine Morland’s bedroom in Austen’s Northanger Abbey thrilled me far more than the spooky chest in my own bedroom, while the closed doors of Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall filled me with more anticipation than any other doors I had known.
The fictional country house is composed of boundaries and rules, and there are few more electrifying transgressions than the one in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), where the second Mrs de Winter, creeping around her predecessor’s old bedroom in the west wing at Manderley, sniffs Rebecca’s nightdress and strokes her lingerie. “Do you think she can see us?” wonders the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?”
That takes us to the heart of our pleasure in the genre: the country house novel turns us all into what Graham Swift calls “innocent thieves.” In Mothering Sunday, Swift’s new novel and his own foray into the genre, there is a great deal of crossing between zones—domestic, generic, sexual and psychological. In brief and lacerating prose, Swift strips the genre bare: the exterior of Upleigh, his novel’s country house, remains undescribed, while the interior is for the most part uninhabited. Except that is in the book’s central scene, when a post-coital maid wanders through the rooms wearing nothing but a Dutch cap.
The novel is set on 30th March 1924—Mothering Sunday—when the nation’s mothers are still grieving for the sons they have lost in the Great War. The tone is elegiac, but the lament is less for the certainties of social hierarchy than the innocence of pre-lapsarian bliss. Jane Fairchild, a servant, is having an affair with Paul Sheringham, a master. He initially paid her for sex but soon mutual interest cancelled the need for purchase.
Illicit sex is a staple of country house fiction, but it is striking how often a consciousness is violated by seeing something it does not understand. What do Miles and Flora know, the feverish governess wonders in James’s The Turn of the Screw? In Atonement, 13-year-old Briony Tallis walks in on the housekeeper’s son with her sister in the library and reads their passion as rape. When Cathy Earnshaw, in Wuthering Heights, returns from her visit to Thrushcross Grange she is mysteriously translated from childlike purity to self-conscious womanhood, leaving Heathcliff vowing revenge on the house.
In Mothering Sunday, the Nivens of Beechwood, where Jane Fairchild is a maid, have lost both their boys, while the Sheringhams, who live in neighbouring Upleigh, have only 23-year-old Paul left, and he’ll be dead by lunchtime. It being Mothering Sunday, the servants at both houses have been freed for the day. With no mother to visit, Jane plans on reading in the garden. She likes boys’ adventure stories because, as she puts it, she likes “reading across a divide.” She also likes the thought “that life itself might be an adventure,” filled with “mental hazarding.” Today she has chosen Youth: a Narrative and Two Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad, which begins, “This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”
Mothering Sunday begins with an act of penetration, so to speak. Instead of reading, Jane sneaks round to see Paul who is alone in Upleigh, and they make love in his bed. She has never before entered a house by the front door (“as if she were a real visitor and he a head footman”), or been in Paul’s bedroom, with its triple-mirrored dressing table and gold-and-cream striped armchair, or lain naked, a trickle of “seed” sliding down her legs while he, in his “surly nakedness,” dresses to meet his fiancée for lunch at the Swan Hotel at Bollingford. There would be a stain on the sheets, Jane thought, but for another maid to deal with. This is “an upside-down day” when the rules no longer apply.
This is also an upside-down novel, a bold interpenetration of country house and sea stories set in the sepia of a Sunday-morning sexual langour with, as its centre of consciousness, a servant girl concerned with her vaginal discharge.
Paul had left her in bed when he went to have lunch. She would have asked him not to go, but this kind of exchange was “disqualified from the upper world in which such dramas were staged.” Like Conrad, Jane Fairchild is an outsider. But today Paul has “bestowed” on her, “for her amusement,” his palace. “She might ransack it if she wished. All hers.” Crossing the threshold, she wanders the empty rooms as naked as Eve, her bare flesh conferring “on her not just invisibility but an exemption from fact.”
She visits Paul’s dressing room, with its amalgam of choices—the privilege of his class: “what will it be today? Who shall I be today?” She pads down the carpeted stairs, where “the hall seemed to tense at her approach. Objects might have scuttled and retreated. They had never witnessed anything like this before.” She takes in the pictures. Paintings were “for maids to study… as they dusted the frames and cleaned the glass.” The drawing room was like “a small deserted foreign country,” but it is the library that she enters most cautiously. This was the room in Beechwood in which “she felt like some welcome, innocent thief.”
Jane’s adventure, when she crosses the divide, reads like one of those dreams in which we go to work without our clothes on. Rarely does fiction invite such intense identification, such mental hazarding. Swift strips his reader bare. Our tension is born of familiarity: we too have done this. Not naked perhaps, but invisible enough to be exempted from fact. Poking around in other people’s houses is our national obsession. We do it when we flick through Hello! or World of Interiors, when we watch Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey. This is what we are doing when we read country house novels, which describe and, more importantly, re-enact the thrill of being in a room belonging to someone of a finer class.
But, thinks Jane, turning the pages, “Sailing ships? Conrad was… already behind the times.” Country houses—and maids, come to that—are also, by 1924, behind the times. And what is a sinking ship, if not a floating country house?
