"A shattering present": KITTY BARNE, Mother at Large (1938)

[Here's another unpublished short review written late last year and now retrieved from my archives. Hope you enjoy it!]

"What a family! Uncle Robert's much the same as ever—he never was a great piece of work. I gather he is seldom there. One daughter is a rabbit, poor soul; nerves or glands or something of the kind. The other, Veronica, is attractive enough—she's captured John all right. She looks quite another kind of person. A gossipy old lady perched beside me for a moment and told me she had been abroad for three or four years; she said it in the sort of intense voice that hints as Pasts. But no one with that mother could have a past, or a future, or anything but a shattering present."

Two families—the charming, artistic, informal Symonds family and the stuffier, well-to-do, and rather more troubled Maxwell-Lindsays— neighbors who have just discovered a distant familial connection, come together with dramatic results when the two young Symonds twins are asked to sing at Mrs. Maxwell-Lindsay's party, after which 19-year-old John has an accident that requires him to stay at the Maxwell-Lindsay's house for several weeks (as so often tends to happen), where he therefore has ample time to fall naively but head-over-heels in love with Veronica, six years his senior, who "has a Past".

The type of middlebrow fiction I most love—humorous, domestic-themed, romantically inclined, a bit on the cozy side—is not calculated to give me a lot of gasp-out-loud plot developments. Often, I could quite confidently place bets about more or less how a novel's plot will end up (though I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by exactly how it gets there), and this doesn't subtract from my reading pleasure any more than knowing, when reading a mystery, that the murderer will ultimately be found out and justice will prevail takes away from the fun of the unravelling. Which made it all the more exciting when I came to page 198 of Mother at Large, Kitty Barne's debut novel, and absolutely gasped in shock and delight, loudly enough that Andy came from the other room to confirm I hadn't maimed myself.

I won't spoil anything about it, because should you be able to get your hands on this novel (or go to the British Library to read it), you should be able to gasp as well (do it quietly if you're at the BL, please), but although this was a slightly darker development than the climax of Doris Langley Moore's A Game of Snakes and Ladders (and this novel overall isn't quite so masterly and brilliant as Moore's), I haven't had such a satisfying gasp/laugh moment since reading that book.

Here, we have a prime example of the monstrous mother theme that was so popular among women writers of this period (I can't help wondering if a powerful Ph.D. dissertation couldn't be written about the sources of this prevalent theme—the changing times, the evolving roles of women, generational rebellion, efforts to liberate oneself from previous norms, etc.). Or in this case I should really say "monstrous Madre", as that's what Mrs. Maxwell-Lindsay's shell-shocked, beaten-down offspring call her. As we meet the family here, "Madre" has convinced herself, thanks to a fortune-teller's premonition, that she will die before the end of June of the current year, and her plans for her impending decease make her even more of a nightmare than usual—driving Gwen nearly to a breakdown and threatening to reveal Veronica's secrets.

I've read and enjoyed several of Kitty Barne's books—she is perhaps best known for her excellent children's book She Shall Have Music and its sequel (for grownups) While the Music Lasted, the latter reprinted by Greyladies a few years back. Like her more famous in-law, Noel Streatfeild (who reportedly encouraged Barne to start writing), Barne is quite good at creating believable family dynamics and entertaining characters. Mother at Large perhaps settles sometimes a bit too much into melodrama for my taste—the hand-wringing over Veronica's scandalous past is certainly realistic for its time, but a little tedious to read about these days—and the structure seemed a little unsteady to me—we start out with the likeable Symonds family (with whom I might have preferred to stay for the entire novel), but they soon all but vanish from the novel while we focus on the Maxwell-Lindsays. None of that kept me from happily turning pages, however, and the resolution of the tale is rather intriguingly unexpected, leaving open at least the possibility that all the characters (even Madre) will end more happily than they began.