The Dower House

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely wonderful read!
Review: A full and rich story that held my interest from the very first line. Speaks of the changes that the Protestant Anglo-Irish began to face after the War without being demeaning - of either those Anglo-Irish or the Irish Catholics. The characters are charming and humorous, even when they are not suppose to be perfect. Davis-Goff's writing style is what makes this story so thoroughly enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: A Modern Classic
Review: I love reading novels; I try to read the very best ones. There isn't room here to define "best" as I understand it, but often I must read works that are one to two hundred years old before I feel certain that the literary fiction in my lap rates with "the best." Fine, latter-day works like Walker Percy's The Moviegoer or (very recently) David Long's The Falling Boy seemed thin on the ground, to say the least.

So imagine my surprise, a few years ago, upon reading a novel that made me wonder about that axiom offered up by the late Irish novelist Frank O'Connor -- that the secret of writing novels died with Jane Austen and Turgenev. The novel that turned my head was The Dower House by one Annabel Davis-Goff. I read it, then returned to the beginning and read it again. Several weeks later, I read it for a third time. Not being an academic, this is something I just don't ordinarily do.

The Dower House is, in my opinion, the best traditional novel written during the past 40 years. Moreover, I'd be hard pressed to think of a single novel I've read that I've found so enjoyable, so utterly consuming -- OK, one not written by Austen, James, or Wharton (fairly select company).

If The Dower House were nothing but a coming-of-age novel, it could hold up its head with anything written since the time of Stendahl and Dickens. But the book offers much more, touching as it does on some of the more important (and distressing) social issues of our time. (Many readers from the American South will feel right at home reading of the plight of the Anglo-Irish at mid-century.) And the prose is delicious: every work fits, every paragraph gives pleasure.

As for the young heroine, Molly Hassard, one will read a great many novels before finding a character as likeable and credible as Molly. So many readers would enjoy this book, and it seems downright unjust that so few people seem to have heard of it.

Rating:
Summary: A Gentle Read.
Review: Such a gentle and evocative book.Lovers of times past will adore this book.Molly is the daughter of a second son of an impoverished,aristocratic Anglo-Irish family-a family,which in her fathers words lost all of its money,importance and place in the scheme of things after W.W.1. I was as enchanted-as indeed Molly still is,by the sheer beauty of the main manor house,Fromore,now owned by her fathers elder brother,and of the Dower House,Fern Hill,originally the place where widows of the owners of the estate,moved to upon the death of their husbands.The gardens,rather run-down now,and the furnishings of the houses are old,solid and in impeccably good taste-something that new money can't buy,but the ability to maintain these properties is becoming more and more difficult as death duties amd other taxes eat away at the rather meagre incomes of the present owners.This a gently sad book-a story of a particular breed of people who are fighting,unsucessfully to stem the tide and realise the fact that they are the last of their line who will be able to keep up the appearances of wealth and gentility .

Rating:
Summary: What a disapointment!
Review: This book had such praise and wonderful reviews that I could not wait to read it.

It started off well enough, but I soon realized that it wasn't so much a novel with a plot, but a series of dismal snapshots into the tarnished life of a boring family. There were just too many family members with similare traits to keep straight. I wish that there had been more of Molly's boarding school experience; that part was interesting. By the end I was tired of the family, the repitition of the lamenting of a gentile life lost etc.

If you want an Irish coming of age in the 50s/60s any of Maeve Binchy's earlier books will be much more captivating!

Rating:
Summary: lots of grist, but unground
Review: This book was disappointing. The elegant and lucid prose should have provided a window into characters of depth and complexity. Instead, we find people stuck in the eighteenth century. This book could have been written in 1800. The Austenesque characters and themes are dated. I kept wanting the author to enter the 20th century, if not the 21st century. These characters are pitiable not because they live in genteel poverty, but because nobody does any work or has any purpose in life. No wonder they lack identity and self-esteem. The moments of near tragedy (the suicide of the most interesting character in the book, for instance) are glossed over and left behind as if their effect on the main character were a mere ripple on the surface of her psyche. There's plenty of material on which depth of character might be built, but no follow-through. Lots of grist for the mill but nothing is ever really ground. The characters fall in love, after a couple of dances and a brief conversation or two, for no apparent reason other than chemistry and a vague sense of cultural similitude. In what world is it all right to dismiss a person because they brought their purse down to breakfast? In the world of this book! I think we are supposed to like this heroine, but I'm not sure why. It's straight out of the 19th century, except that, in that era, writers were forging NEW ground. Jane Austen would have reprimanded these characters for their shallowness. This book looks at a very similar world yet without the astringent irony you find in Jane Austen. The drama and tragedy of Hardy is missing. The humor of Dickens is missing. Is it too much to expect one's contemporary writers to be contemporary? Original? My main feeling? What a waste of talent.

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written, satisfying read for Anglophiles!
Review: This novel is a wonderful glimpse of the vanishing world of the Anglo-Irish. It is the story of Molly Hassard, who grows up first at Fern Hill, a beautiful but slowly decaying dower hose, and then at Dromore, her uncle's island estate, to which Fern Hill belongs. Molly and her more privileged cousin Sophie are forced as they grow older to make choices between the romantic genteel poverty of the Anglo-Irish lifestyle in which they were raised and the comfort, prosperity and hard practicalities represented by life in London. Because they are women, and it is the 1950's and 60's, their choices are really about they men they choose to marry. Annabel Davis-Goff writes tenderly and evocatively about a disappearing way of life. One of the best things about this book is that Molly is completely aware that her childhood belongs to a past that will never be recovered, and she, like the reader, is enchanted by all of it -- the houses and the way they were run, the gardens, the parties, the local characters, and perhaps most of all, the proud and impractical Anglo-Irish themselves, represented most vividly by Molly's father, Tibby, and her aunt Belinda, and embodied in Molly's eyes in Desmond Paget. If you like novels of England-between-the-wars (e.g., Angela Thirkell), England-during-WWII (e.g., Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Cazalet Chronicles"), and England-after-the-war through the 60's and 70's (e.g. Rosamunde Pilcher), you will enjoy this well-written, moving book. I liked it so well that I have ordered Davis-Goff's memoir, "Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Anglo-Irish Childhood," from Amazon.co.uk (it's out-of-print in the US).