Claire and Verity’s Persephone Reading Weekend is finally here – hurrah! I’m so looking forward to reading more about Persephones both old and new from all the participating bloggers. I was still a relatively new convert to the Persephone cult last year during the reading week and it did so much to introduce me to titles I hadn’t yet thought of trying and to increase my enjoyment of the books I was familiar with through discussions with other fans. I’m sure this year will be every bit as engaging and enjoyable!
House-Bound by Winifred Peck was not a Persephone I’d read much about prior to purchasing it. I knew it was set in Edinburgh (loosely fictionalized as ‘Castleburgh’ in the novel) and that it was about a woman who, unable to find domestic help during the Second World War, firmly resolves to take on these duties herself. This all sounded quite charming to me. The opening lines both intrigued me and put me on edge:
It was as she stood in Mrs Loman’s Registry Office for Domestic Servants that Rose Fairweather suddenly realised what a useless and helpless woman she was. Up till that moment she had always assumed vaguely that she was a busy and useful member of society.
Was this going to be a novel full of unhappy housewives, women feeling stifled by their domestic chores, humourlessly moaning about their tyrannical husbands, viewing their houses as prisons rather than homes? If so, I wanted no part in it. Happily, House-Bound proved to be a most delightful, thoughtful, and quietly amusing book, absolutely what I was in the mood for!
Rose Fairweather, by the time we are introduced to her as a middle-age matron, has led an interesting but generally unremarkable life. After being widowed during the First War, Rose married Stuart, her cousin’s widower and the father of her darling Mickie, who Rose had been raising alongside her own daughter Flora since his mother’s death. It was a marriage of convenience but a relatively contented one. It is not a life of passion but of compromise, of subdued but content emotions. In time, a third child Tom was added to the family, the eternal philosopher and peacemaker as the other members – particularly the petulant Flora – drift further and further away from one another. But while family dynamics and emotional encounters do eventually come to form the crux of the book, it begins simply with a woman in need of a few maids and a cook struck by the revolutionary idea of assuming their work herself in light of the wartime labour shortage.
Rose does struggle courageously with her newly assumed housekeeping tasks, as would anyone taking on the chores of three maids with no experience either cooking or cleaning! Even with the invaluable aid of the indomitable Mrs. Childe, who trains Rose for three hours a day in the basics of housekeeping, and the irrepressible Major Hosmer, who admirably exemplifies American efficiency and straightforwardness, guiding Rose not only in her housework but in her emotional development, Rose’s life becomes consumed by her house. She works and works but is never done, never able to live up to the standards she expects of herself, and becomes so caught up in her new concerns and new routine that she doesn’t even want to leave her house, happier to stay and work there than to venture out to volunteer meetings or social obligations, happier to live in this world of her own creating, under her control, as war drives the outside world mad. For her, her home is as much a fortress as it is a prison, a universe she understands and controls even if she can’t quite manage it as well as she might wish.
What ‘house-bound’ really comes to mean for Rose is the emotional rather than physical isolation of the self:
More and more it seemed to her that every human being was in some sense of what she herself was literally, nowadays, house-bound, tethered inexorably to a collection of all the extinct memories, and what the Major would call inhibitions, with which they had grown up, bits of mental furniture which they dusted and inspected daily. ‘And we all have our kitchens too,’ she thought with the erratic fancifulness of fatigue, ‘where we hash up our motives, and warm up our own opinion of ourselves, and hoard all the goods we’ve inherited or got hold of instead of wishing to share them. And there are barriers between us all, or most of us. Stuart couldn’t get into the Major’s house. I’m not really at home in Stuart’s! And as for poor Flora. All her doors and windows are locked and shuttered, and I’ve never been inside since she was a baby. Oh dear, oh dear, how are we all to get out?’
Her family has come to barely know one another: yes, the boys are alright, but Rose, Stuart, and Flora live so much within themselves that the others are little more than strangers. Her resentful daughter Flora selfishly views herself as the tragic victim of her mother’s neglect, cast aside by Rose in favour of her step-brother Mickie and Rose’s husband Stuart, never openly affectionate or demonstrative, seems to have drifted further and further away until Rose has no understanding of him, of what he thinks or feels. What the book really focuses on is the breaking down of those walls that allows Rose to see her family anew, of the revelations about the characters of those closest to Rose that are unfortunately brought about by tragic turns of events (almost too much tragedy – indeed, it stretches the imagination that so many awful things could happen so quickly in one family).
There is a strong warning though this latter part of the novel that the old conventions, the codes of conduct which required stoicism and the bottling up of emotions, the full laying of the dinner table complete with flowers and useless accoutrements every evening, have no place in the world being shaped by the on-going war. Major Hosmer exemplifies the spirit of openness which Peck seems to imply we must strive for: the future must be bright and energetic, with no emotional baggage or pointless traditions to weight us down. We must have the courage to face our failings, to share our thoughts and emotions rather than keep them to ourselves while pushing others away. We must confront our fears and rise to them, however much we may rather hide from them within ourselves, alone but protected.
In terms of writing and characterization, this is a good novel but certainly not a great one. Published in 1942, it paints a fascinating picture of mid-war life, both in terms of daily domestic life and social conventions. However, its greatest virtue must come from its willingness to confront what Peck certainly viewed as her society’s damagingly antisocial conventions of human behaviour, the isolation of the self that leaves so many people to struggle alone just when they need the warmth of human understanding most.
Happy Persephone Reading Weekend! Hurrah!
I didn’t know House-Bound was set in (a barely-disguised) Edinburgh.
Thought-provoking and insightful post. I haven’t read House-Bound but I am intrigued.
The premise definitely sounds interesting, but I’m not sure I’m up for a book with so much tragedy that it stretches the imagination…
I’ve read several reviews of this book and have yet to make up my mind whether or not to include it in my collection. I’m still intrigued though…
Great review. I haven’t read this one, but your review had me once again admiring the courage of those who had to live during the war years and all that they sacrificed for those of us who would come after them.
I’ve just finished A Woman’s Place which has so much background about women’s work in the 20th century, so I should really read this one soon — I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to be a domestic, it’s really a thankless job. I hope this book doesn’t make me feel bad about my own terrible housekeeping!
Fantastic review Claire. I was surprised by the content of this when I read it for last year’s reading week too. I loved how House-Bound was about much more than housework, but about convention and the breaking down of barriers that had prevented real emotion and communication between people for so long. I really enjoyed it, and I loved how hope reigned supreme.
That’s a great quote and your review makes me more interested in checking it out, I thought it was just about a husband and wife learning to share the work more efficiently. Even though my husband quite willingly shares the chores with me, I still struggle with feeling that a woman should be doing most of them, so this could be an interesting discussion of that and more — perhaps that a home is made up of people, not a dusted collection of objects.
I’ve had this book and the book I read for this weekend (The Home-Maker) hopelessly mixed up in my head. I own both of them and am mixed up enough that I actually read the first few pages of this book before I realized I was reading the wrong one. It was off to a good start, though, and your review makes me eager to read the rest.
Fascinating review! I’ve got this one on my shelf, but need to feel brave enough to start it to face all the tragedy I think.
This looks really interesting! I thought it was going to be sadder than you make it sound — a lot of the Persephones I’ve read have been highly grim, and these sounds only, you know, mediumish grim. :p
Like Jenny, I’ve found several Persephones rather grim and haven’t finished them. House-bound was one of them.
And as Karenlibrarbrian says, housework is a thankless task. However, it was more of a thankless task a generation of two ago when these books were being written. We didn’t have the conveniences of washer/dryers, deep frezes, electric gizmos for almost every task under the sun (which itself shows up the dust!)
Perhaps, though, instead of resenting housework, unrelenting though it is, we should attempt again to take a pride in keeping our homes looking bright and fresh? This might seem pathetic to some, but surely it is better to take a pride in our own home environment and clean with good grace, have sparkling windows and polished surfaces than to inhabit dust and muddle? If a little housework is done each day, and muddle not allowed to expand, we can then have time to do the more fun things which aren’t houseWORK but houseFUN (for want of a better word.) Arranging some flowers (I don’t mean rigid floral displays, but even a bunch of daffs in a pot to brighten a breakfast table), needlework, cooking some tasty scones for afternoon tea, even sitting and reading in a calm oasis of cleanliness and orderliness – reading blogs! I love it when I’ve had a spring clean (at whatever time of the year), washed the windows, polished the silver, shampooed the carpets (well, husband does that – I’m good at delegating!) etc. The house also seems more spacious when it’s clean and tidy!
This sounds like another must read. I do enjoy war time experiences even from a domestic side.
I work on the mantra do a little bit each day and then I know come Saturday I can have the day to myself and my books!
this sounds so wonderful. I’m very fascinated by the premise. And I think I’ll really enjoy the mid-war setting.
Much like the commenters above, I had expected the book to be just focused on house work, but it seems to be so much more. I am intrigued, though I admit, this might not be first on my list of Persephone’s to buy.
No one has commented on the spiritual dimension of this book. I was particularly moved by the quotation….Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy ask’d, I mercy found…..This is Remembrance Sunday, and I would like to think that all the victims of war ‘mercy found’.
[…] diaries from women like Nella Last and Clara Milburn, and Persephone’s other WWII-era offerings (House-Bound being one excellent example). Panter-Downes’ focus is never on the overtly dramatic – there […]