Jane gardam crusoes daughter. Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam 2022-12-16

Comfort reading: Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam

I'm also consoled that, 27 after its first publication, this enduringly original novel should have been reissued, introducing prickly Polly to. The suggestion didn't go down very well with my fellow panellists, for reasons its author As its title suggests, this is the most bookish of books, the richly parented progeny of a literary heritage that goes back to Robinson Crusoe's island. Its head slotted into a hole in its china shoulders and it nodded in rime to the up-and-down ribbon bow. As part of a panel to celebrate the Booker's 40th anniversary I even proposed that it could - and should - have won the Booker prize. I don't remember the words, only the white starched bow beneath Aunt Mary's chin. The Welsh are very dirty. .

Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (English) Paperback Book

Events occur undramatically, related with equal weight no matter what their relative significance. She lives in England near the sea. Doom was in the dining-room. Polly Flint is the biological daughter of a sea captain, who in 1904 takes the six-year-old girl to stay with two maiden aunts on the saltmarshes of England's north-east coast and then promptly goes down with his ship. Published in 1985, it would have ousted Keri Hulme's The Bone People. I knew from the very beginning that these occasions were the only ones when she was disappointed in me, and in herself, for she saw in them her own failure.

Crusoes Daughter AM Gardam Jane Little Brown Book Group Paperback Softback

I seemed to be looking down at a globe with two weighted sticks hanging below it. I felt uncomfortable and stout, and that there was a very great deal of me. Very quickly in fact I became muddled about whether I had ever lived anywhere else, and the time before the arrival on the sandy step was very cloudy. Quirky, opinionated and gloriously solipsistic, Polly is a comic character whose struggles with identity reflect the struggles of England to come to terms with the end of empire. Gardam's award-winning books include God on the Rocks and The Pangs of Love. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc.

Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam

Now and then a door across the hall would open on incisive conversation and once a woman with a green face who carried black knitting and was dressed in black knitting came and glared round the morning room door at me. Yet I cannot at all remember the day my father went away. Once she loved a young poet who died in the Great War; later there was a German-Jewish refugee who placed his daughters in Polly's care before he died. I spent much of my life on the kitchen floor, too, alongside the three or four — I think — other children in her care. I was asked to sit by Aunt Mary in her study window and we talked of sin. Sometimes it's even consoling to read about people more scared, cold and miserable than oneself — think of all those orphans and consumptives in Victorian literature. I sat on a stool and knew that my father was having all these funny people on.

Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam

Under her indoor hat her hair was silvery fair, and on her chin the bristles were silvery too. She won the prestigious Whitbread Award for The Hollow Landand The Queen of the Tambourine, while God on the Rockswas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I remember an afternoon walking with him by the sea, dodging waves, and his figure dozing disgracefully in the morning in a button-back chair beside the catafalque of the drawing-room chimney-piece. But Polly's spiritual father is Daniel Defoe. The distance between the loose-tiled hall and the foot of the staircase was a landscape, and the newel-post and the banisters had to be held tight. Orphaned shortly thereafter, Polly will spend the next eighty years stranded in this quiet corner of the world as the twentieth century rages in the background.

Crusoe’s Daughter

But that may be just as well. They came out of dark shops far away in a black town which may have been Middlesborough. She discovers a copy of Robinson Crusoe in the gloomy study of her aunts' house, and the book comes with her when she is taken off to a new home on the plains of York by Mr Thwaite, an elderly relative whose relationship to her is a mystery. All the men were black, but not black like the black seamen in Wales who sometimes came to the foster-mother's house and when they washed were black still. For it appeared that I might lose it.

Shall we sit in silence for a moment? The train ran out of the grit and the chimneys when the last of the men got out, and between high sand-hills. The little knitted woman retired to the other end of the room and bent to her needles in an arbour of potted ferns, and the maid coming in with coals for the fire put them down and hid her head in her apron at the singing. Polly struggles with what it means to be a woman in the modern world, worrying that without male advantages, or a husband, she will become part of the landscape. I felt interesting contradictions in my father. The train rocked and my father whistled through his teeth. My own choice is a novel I first read more than 20 years ago and have kept close ever since. Characters in fiction cannot make new departures.

Saturdays were the time for this, after the three ladies had all been to church for their own confession. You'll sink like an anchor. We could not cope with another Emma. Aunt Mary said nothing for she seemed to notice nothing. Unable to love, her constant companion becomes three inches of whisky, from which she is only rescued in middle age when her maid marries a headmaster, thus upturning the social order and enabling Polly to become a teacher. My father was bringing me to live with my aunts — bleak Miss Mary, gentle Miss Frances. There are good meat pies.