Mothering Sunday (Swift)

Mothering Sunday:  A Romance
Graham Swift, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101947524


Summary
A luminous, intensely moving tale that begins with a secret lovers’ assignation in the spring of 1924, then unfolds to reveal the whole of a remarkable life.

Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house.

The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane’s life forever.

As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment.

Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 4, 1949
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Dulwich College; Cambridge; University of York
• Awards—Booker Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England


Graham Colin Swift is a well-known British author and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of poet Ted Hughes.

Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons.

Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.

Works
1980 - The Sweet-Shop Owner
1982 - Shuttlecock (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize)
1983 - Waterland
1988 - Out of This World
1992 - Ever After
1996 - Last Orders (Booker Prize)
2003 - The Light of Day
2007 - Tomorrow
2009 - Making an Elephant: Writing from Within
2012 - Wish you Were Here
2016 - Mothering Sunday

(Author bio from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Swift describes events long in the past in a way that gives them intense and permanent presentness. The vividly lost quality of the day is conveyed through a series of repeating motifs. The phone call, white orchids in the Sheringhams' hall, Paul's bedsheets. The story has an unmoored, dreamy quality, which captures the way such days become lodged in the recollections of youth…[Swift's] lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.
Sophie Gee - New York Times Book Review


[A] dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive. You finish it and immediately read it again, because, like War and Peace, it’s a marvelous novel of possibilities.
Jackie McGlone - Herald (Scotland)


Masterful...[Swift] performs a complex enough conjuring trick, creating a perfect small tragedy with all the spring and tension of a short story, spinning around it  a century of consequences with so light a touch that they only brush against the charmed centre.... Mothering Sunday is both a dissection of the nature of fiction and a gripping story; a private catastrophe played out in the quiet drawing rooms of the English upper middle-class, the drama that unfolds is all the more potent for its containment.... The narrative...accumulates the saturated erotic intensity of a Donne sonnet.... Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly.... Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece.
Christobel Kent - Guardian (UK)
 

An almost musical quality, like a Bach prelude and fugue reworking and reinventing themes and ideas...both unsettling and deeply affecting. Mothering Sunday is a powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed novel about the lives we lead, and the parallel lives—the parallel stories—we can never know.... It may just be Swift’s best novel yet.
Hannah Beckerman - Observer (UK)


Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing, too.... At the narrative level, Mothering Sunday has a lot in common with earlier works of historical fiction—Ian McEwan’s pair of novels about a moment that resonates across the decades, Atonement and On Chesil Beach, and David Miller’s Today.
Leo Robson - Financial Times (UK)
 

This is the story of a woman’s becoming, as she discovers her power and possibility. It is a lot to pack into such a slim and tidy volume. But for all the detailed examination of character and the bold sweep of time, there is not a word wasted.... A lesson in poetic brevity.... There is a lulling quality to the movement between sections of the book—rhythms and repetitions, the ebb and flow of a tide, the wearing down of rock to form sand on a beach.... This is a rare read indeed.
Ellah Allfrey - Spectator (UK)
 

A dazzling novel...beautiful.... A vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy. The shires gentry and their servants move around the pages with solid authenticity.... Wonderfully accomplished...an achievement.
Peter Kemp - Sunday Times (UK)


( Starred review.) [T]his elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition.... [Swift's] depiction of a fragile caste clinging to traditions that define their sense of noblesse oblige...is poignant and moving—as is his intimation of a brilliant personal destiny that rises from the ashes of a tragically bygone social order.
Publishers Weekly


Jane, servant in a great house in the waning Downton days of 1924, can no longer see Paul, a young man from the neighboring house about to be married. What happens next is not Jane's piteous unwinding but the story of an orphan who begins life in service and eventually becomes a great writer and mistress of culture.
Library Journal


( Starred review.) A perfect gem of a novel. With his unmistakable gift for detailed exactitude and emotional subtlety, Swift lightly touches on weighty issues of loss and abandonment, boldness and survival. The antidote to Downton Abbey’s prolonged manor-house soap opera, Swift’s succinct rags-to-riches tale of a young woman’s unexpected metamorphosis is a rich and nuanced evocation of an innocent yet titillating time. —Carol Haggas
Booklist


( Starred review.) In England of 1924, a maid who knows her affair with an estate owner's son must end, ...is a marvelous creation who can seem wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty, bringing to mind Molly Bloom. Swift has fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What do you think attracts Jane to Paul? What are the needs that each fulfills for the other? Why is it important to see them together in “utter mutual nakedness” at first, and often through the lens of animal metaphors?

2. The novel focuses exclusively on Jane’s point of view, but she is not a first-­person narrator. What is the effect of this slight narrative distance between the reader and narrator, and what might it say about Jane’s ultimate profession as a novelist?

3. What is the significance of Mothering Sunday for each of the characters, and what does the meaning of the day reveal about Jane’s sense of self? Is Jane more liberated or saddened by the reminder of her own orphanhood and lack of a mother?

4. Discuss the hierarchy within the Nivens’ household. How does the employment of Jane and Cook Milly at Beechwood fit into the sense that Britain is changing and modernizing? What’s the difference between older and younger generations of servants vis-a-­vis their respect for hierarchy, and between the servants at Beechwood versus Upleigh?

5. What’s informative about reading this story through a from the perspective of a maid—­someone whose job it is to both pay close attention to details and to ignore them?

6. Why does Jane feel able to push the limits of her freedom as a maid, and how does she do so with the Nivens and Paul? To what degree does she feel bound to her role, down to her “ghostly maid’s clothes,” and does that change over the course of her life?

7. How would you describe Jane’s sense of humor?

8. Describe the different relationships between parents and children in the novel. How does the constant reminder of the holiday of Mothering Sunday, and of Paul and Emma’s wedding, throughout the book complicate those traditional family ties, including marriage itself? And what does that say about the way tradition will carry through into the future?

9. The novel is structured in short vignettes that move back and forth in time, in intervals big and small. What are the effects of this mode of storytelling on the book’s feeling of suspense, and of how we learn about Jane?

10. Why is it so important to Jane not to define what is true or not true in her writing, especially given her fierce love of books, which, she claims, are a way people “escape the troubles of their lives”?

11. Where does Jane gain the greatest sense of belonging? Does she yearn more for inclusion or independence, to possess or to be possessed? Consider the statement that "life itself...was the sum of its possessions," and what this means for Jane in particular, a servant with an extreme paucity of belongings

12. Did you always trust Jane’s observations, memories, interpretations of events? If not, what made you question them, and/or the reliability of memory in general throughout the novel?

13. Did you get the impression that Jane ever felt guilty about Paul’s accident? Does the novel suggest that the characters were more at the mercy of fate or free will?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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