Gainsborough and his ‘wild girls’

Emily Howes’s smart debut novel portrays an 18thcentury family beset by madness and self-delusion

384pp, Phoenix, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £11.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Thomas Gainsborough first painted his beloved daughters Molly and Peggy when they were aged six and five, reaching after a butterfly. The result was both a celebration of childhood innocence and a reminder of how fleeting it is. And in a book that takes many of its cues from Gainsborough’s portraits, this is also where Emily Howes’s hugely impressive debut novel begins. As narrated by Peggy, The Painter’s Daughters opens in her lost Eden of rural Suffolk, where she and her sister wander together free of care.

But not for very long. Already, Peggy can see that there are times when Molly “is not herself”: the euphemism to which the family cling as her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic – or, if you prefer (although the family don’t), increasingly mad. The most determinedly optimistic is doting Thomas, with his firm belief that “everything fixes itself ”. His wife, Margaret, is more anxious, although her diagnosis and proposed remedy are wishful, too. The problem, she decides, is that the girls have been allowed to “run wild”; what they need is for the Gainsboroughs to move to fashionable Bath, where they can become respectable young ladies, their father can earn more money and “all will be new”.

Peggy, however, is a lot less sure. She’s the only one who really knows how disturbed Molly is, something she strives to hide from everybody else, casting herself as sole protector. But, we’re invited to wonder, how pure are Peggy’s motives? Might her love for Molly be combined with less noble feelings, such as a pleasurable ownership of her older sister and a pride in her own self-sacrifice? Might it even be reassuring for her to see Molly as the mad one when she has some troubling episodes of her own?

A similarly satisfying tangled psychology is at work in Howes’s depiction of the Gainsboroughs’ marriage and their role as parents. At first sight, dad is a straightforwardly fun guy, happy to let the girls enjoy themselves; mum, a boringly responsible shrew. The longer the novel goes on, however, the more it questions this apparent – and possibly familiar – dichotomy.

For one thing, Peggy begins to notice that her father is only fun when it suits him: when he’s not absorbed in work, boozing with his friends or ushering a succession of young women into his private studio. For another, Margaret’s practicality starts to come across more as shrewdness than shrewishness, an

understanding of how things are, rather than how they ought to be.

Given that Howes is a psychotherapist by trade, her nuanced awareness of family dynamics may be unsurprising. What’s more unexpected is the deftness with which she transforms it into a novel at her first attempt. In fact, the pages fly by so readably that it’s only thinking about the book later – or reviewing it – that you realise quite how rich it is.

The same lightness of touch applies to Howes’s use of what seems like extensive research. We learn a lot of fascinating stuff about Gainsborough without ever feeling remotely lectured. Every place and time in which the novel touches down feels thoroughly imagined, rather than fitted together from the source material. And this includes the story of Margaret’s mother, interspersed with Peggy’s main narrative, where we slowly discover what lies behind Margaret’s mysterious hints about her daughters’ privileged bloodline. (I won’t spoil this beautifully effective historical “what if ”, except to say that it has an explosively ironic twist.)

The Painter’s Daughters does have one flaw: at times, Peggy can seem suspiciously like a 21stcentury feminist plonked down in the 1700s, with her articulate chafing against the patriarchy. Granted, the importing of contemporary attitudes into the historical novel is as old as the historical novel itself. But in this case, it does mean that Howes’s lightness of touch occasionally, and jarringly, goes missing from what’s otherwise a wonderfully accomplished debut.

Peggy knows how disturbed Molly truly is. But doting Thomas refuses to see it

Light touch: Molly and Peggy in 1756, by their father, Thomas Gainsborough