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White Flower
Stella is turning 30 and lives alone in an apartment on the banks of the Thames in south-east London. Her mental health has unravelled after her mother’s death from cancer, leaving her unemployed and isolated.
In Edwardian England, Julia is surrounded by friends but longing for solitude. She is mourning her elder daughter, a young photographer who has mysteriously died after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka.
Julia and Stella’s stories are obliquely linked across space and time beyond their respective loss. Charlotte Beeston’s debut charts the ebb and flow of the grieving process, explored through the prisms of memory, imagination and photography. In elegant, spare prose, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the female psyche, and the permanence of love, art and friendship.
In Edwardian England, Julia is surrounded by friends but longing for solitude. She is mourning her elder daughter, a young photographer who has mysteriously died after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka.
Julia and Stella’s stories are obliquely linked across space and time beyond their respective loss. Charlotte Beeston’s debut charts the ebb and flow of the grieving process, explored through the prisms of memory, imagination and photography. In elegant, spare prose, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the female psyche, and the permanence of love, art and friendship.
194 pages, Paperback
Published November 27, 2024
79 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 9, 2024
There is a lot she does not tell him. The doubt that has shadowed her all her life; the loathing, a secret kind she reserves for herself, and in the grey afternoon light, with his books piled neatly on the shelves behind her, she does not mention the white flower.
White Flower is a beautifully and sensitively written meditation on the bond between a mother and daughter and on grief, written after the author lost her own mother.
The novel is told in two alternating parts, which are in a spiritual dialogue:
- "Stella" - set in present day East London, and told in the third person. Stella, in her early 30s has lost her mother to cancer and is undergoing EMDR therapy to help her process her feelings and her grief.
During one session she suddenly sees a striking vision of a white flower, one than then appears frequently to her in her dreams, and even while waking:
Ready? he asks, finally.
She nods, closes her eyes, and he begins to tap each hand quickly with a pen. Right and left. Right and left. To stimulate different parts of her brain and move her into asubtly different consciousness. In this new space, the dark blank of her mind begins to open. The first image is faint: a tiny globe of light, like a pearl, that slowly expands into one, two, then three white, softly grooved petals, opening from the centre. A flower, unlike any flower she has seen before, amid glossy-green pointed leaves.
[...]
The flower. It comes to her with a clarity she finds as-tonishing. The whiteness, the tilt of its petals, the purity. She sees it on her mat during yoga, in the gold halo of the teacher's candles, each night when she closes her eyes before sleep. Walking through the city, her eyes find foral images on advertising boards, the spines of books in shops. She notices a single rose blooming out of season in the park.
- "Julia" - set in 1910, and told in the first person. Julia's daughter, Helena, has died after a short illness immediately after a trip to, what was then, Ceylon, where she accompanied an early travel writer, William, as his photographer. Julia's thoughts are addressed to Helena, whose absence she still can not process.
Stella's quest to discover what flower this is leads her to detailed research in the British library and the link between the two parts comes with both women reading the same book (possibly the same copy), William's book on his travels in Ceylon, which Beeston has in turn, as she acknowledges, based on passages from the 1908 book In Old Ceylon by Reginald Farrer (as well as Leonard Woolf's autobiographical Growing: Seven Years in Ceylon):
Exquisite.
White Flower is a beautifully and sensitively written meditation on the bond between a mother and daughter and on grief, written after the author lost her own mother.
The novel is told in two alternating parts, which are in a spiritual dialogue:
- "Stella" - set in present day East London, and told in the third person. Stella, in her early 30s has lost her mother to cancer and is undergoing EMDR therapy to help her process her feelings and her grief.
During one session she suddenly sees a striking vision of a white flower, one than then appears frequently to her in her dreams, and even while waking:
Ready? he asks, finally.
She nods, closes her eyes, and he begins to tap each hand quickly with a pen. Right and left. Right and left. To stimulate different parts of her brain and move her into asubtly different consciousness. In this new space, the dark blank of her mind begins to open. The first image is faint: a tiny globe of light, like a pearl, that slowly expands into one, two, then three white, softly grooved petals, opening from the centre. A flower, unlike any flower she has seen before, amid glossy-green pointed leaves.
[...]
The flower. It comes to her with a clarity she finds as-tonishing. The whiteness, the tilt of its petals, the purity. She sees it on her mat during yoga, in the gold halo of the teacher's candles, each night when she closes her eyes before sleep. Walking through the city, her eyes find foral images on advertising boards, the spines of books in shops. She notices a single rose blooming out of season in the park.
- "Julia" - set in 1910, and told in the first person. Julia's daughter, Helena, has died after a short illness immediately after a trip to, what was then, Ceylon, where she accompanied an early travel writer, William, as his photographer. Julia's thoughts are addressed to Helena, whose absence she still can not process.
Stella's quest to discover what flower this is leads her to detailed research in the British library and the link between the two parts comes with both women reading the same book (possibly the same copy), William's book on his travels in Ceylon, which Beeston has in turn, as she acknowledges, based on passages from the 1908 book In Old Ceylon by Reginald Farrer (as well as Leonard Woolf's autobiographical Growing: Seven Years in Ceylon):
Five-cleft is the corolla of the temple-flower, of creamy texture, and of a creamy colour that deepens insensibly to rich yellow at the centre ; and its scent is of the same texture, of the same colour as the flower— a thick, waxy-sweet scent, creamy, dense, and primrose. It haunts all the shrines of Lanka with its pungent, uplifting ecstasy, and never any little vihara or dagaba shall you find that has not its gnarled and ancient tree of plumiera, bossy and twisted and contorted in growth, with corrugated bark of pure silver and leafless twigs, thick and stumpy as a sausage, crowned by clusters of those divine flowers, ready always for offering at the shrine.
(from in Old Ceylon)
Exquisite.
November 14, 2024
If you love a split timeline, women's voices, mother-daughter relationships, grief, and observations on art and photography, this one's for you. The White Flower was so beautiful. Some parts altered my brain chemistry forever. A lot of it felt like poetry. One of the (many!!!) quotes that left a mark on me:
"She turns to look at her mother, standing further up the beach, hair blowing in the wind. And in that moment, Stella is struck by a realisation: she and her mother are entirely separate. Her mother is distinct from her, with her own thoughts and feelings, and this feels both strange and completely natural."
💙💙💙
"She turns to look at her mother, standing further up the beach, hair blowing in the wind. And in that moment, Stella is struck by a realisation: she and her mother are entirely separate. Her mother is distinct from her, with her own thoughts and feelings, and this feels both strange and completely natural."
💙💙💙
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews