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WRITING YOUR WILL

THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. WHEN my mother died, she left a will that cut me out of her estate. It was a logical act — I was in better financial shape than my siblings — but it was still hurtful.

A will is a message from beyond the grave. The intentions behind it can never be explained and the consequences cannot be foreseen. Fiction is full of examples of this.

In George Eliot’s great 1871 novel Middlemarch, the jealous husband Casaubon adds a codicil to his will which disinherits his wife Dorothea if ever she marries his young cousin, Will Ladislaw.

This has the opposite effect to the one he intended. The will makes her realise that he was mean-spirited and it drives her into Ladislaw’s arms. No novel is more convincing about the folly of trying to shape the future posthumously.

Another pitfall is trying to use a will to right past wrongs, as brilliantly shown in The Other Family by Joanna Trollope. When pianist Richie Rossiter dies suddenly, he is living with Chrissie and their three daughters. But his will, made shortly before his death, leaves his grand piano and his music publishing rights to the wife he abandoned but never divorced, and their son Scott.

Because he never married Chrissie, she is faced by an inheritance tax bill that she can pay only by selling the house, which throws her family into turmoil.

In the end, the two families come to an uneasy peace and a friendship forms between Scott and Chrissie’s youngest daughter. But while the novel’s ending is not entirely bleak, the misery caused by Rossiter’s retrospective act of expiation is extreme. The novel makes it clear that you can’t buy forgiveness with a legacy.

The other mistake people can make is to trust other people’s good intentions: when Mr Dashwood dies in Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility, he leaves everything to his son by his first marriage, entrusting him the maintenance of his second wife and their three daughters.

John Dashwood has every intention of doing the right thing by his stepmother and half-sisters, but it doesn’t take long for his wife to convince him that the money would be so much better spent on his own family — and the Dashwood sisters and their mother are forced to live in greatly reduced circumstances.

As these novels make clear, wills are powerful things.