Think your family has issues? Meet Gainsborough’s ‘wild’ daughters
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
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 are left to 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 definitely don’t), increasingly mad. The most determinedly optimistic is doting Thomas, with his firm belief, or blithe hope, that “everything fixes itself”. His wife Margaret is more anxious, although her diagnosis and proposed remedy are pretty 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 – not least because the sisters are inseparable and she’s the only one who really knows how disturbed Molly is: something she strives to hide from everybody else, with herself as sole protector. But, we’re gradually invited to wonder, how pure are Peggy’s motives? Her love for Molly is never in doubt. Yet might it 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 distinctly 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 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. Yet if this makes it sound as though Howes merely substitutes one simple understanding for another, that would be to underestimate her subtlety – because this is a novel that heroically refuses to simplify anything.
Given that Howes is a psychotherapist by trade, such nuanced awareness of family dynamics may be unsurprising. What’s more unexpected is the complete 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 21st-century 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.
The Painter’s Daughters is published by Phoenix at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
