A single day that shapes a writer’s life
Novelist Swift creates moment of freedom for protagonist that marks transformation
Graham Swift’s “Mothering Sunday” seems at first like a grab for some “Downton Abbey” love, but it’s really a demonstration of what this Booker winner can do in the tight space of a single day.
The novella focuses on March 30, 1924, “when there were no longer horses” in Berkshire, England. A servant named Jane Fairchild takes advantage of the holiday to slip off to the Sheringhams’ grand home and sleep with Master Paul. Seven years earlier, when they were teenagers, Paul paid her for sex, but now their clandestine relationship has evolved into something more complex: “They’d become accomplished, unfumbling, serious-faced addicts at what they did,” Swift writes. Still, Jane knows this is the last day of their upstairs/downstairs tryst: In two weeks, Paul plans to marry Miss Emma Hobday. “He ought surely to make some stronger show of being the eager husband,” Jane thinks while admiring his stallionlike body. Despite Swift’s precise attention to the manners of this antique world, he casts the day as a kind of fairy tale: “Once upon a time,” he says again and again — not just to throw the calendar back but to alert us to the advent of something magical. Paul’s family is about to experience another unspeakable loss, piled atop “a great gust of devastation” they endured during World War I. And yet for Jane, so clever, so attuned to the world, today will mark a wondrous transformation.
This is, we quickly come to realize, not the tale of an upperclass cad taking advantage of a neighbor’s maid but the story of one writer’s beginnings. Looking back from almost 70 years later, Jane knows “there never was a day like this. … It would stay eerily imprinted.” Left alone after Paul rushes off to lunch with his fiancee, Jane wanders nude through the rooms of his family’s mansion. Turning a corner, she can see her entire body in a mirror for the first time: “This is me!” she marvels and keeps moving through the house. “Few things could be more shocking than for a woman to enter a library naked. … A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her.”
We catch glimpses of Jane discovering boys’ adventure books and gathering up words “like one of those nest-building birds.” And then the novella leaps ahead: By the end of the 20th century, she’s a renowned, “challenging author,” irritated by the tedious, redundant questions of journalists, including, “How did you become a writer?” She spins plausible answers over and over, but she’ll never reveal the details of that day she wandered naked in a rich man’s library and felt “beset by the inconstancy of words.”
Next to Swift’s previous novels, such as “Last Orders” (1996) or his emotionally devastating “Wish You Were Here” (2011), “Mothering Sunday” feels elliptical, even minor. But it’s an elegant reflection on the impulse to tell stories (a subject he addressed more personally in his nonfiction work “Making an Elephant”). For Jane, he writes, “it would always be the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling.” Surely, Swift is describing himself, too.
“Few things could be more shocking than for a woman to enter a library naked. … A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her.”