The Squire

by Enid Bagnold

Awaiting the birth of her fifth child the squire talks with her younger friend, Caroline, and gains a new perspective on her life

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Family

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

British writer of novels and plays, best known for National Velvet and The Chalk Garden.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enid_Bag...

Reviews

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned from the Introduction that this was a memoir of sorts from Enid Bagnold....her reminisces of her giving birth to her 4 children...childbirth itself...

This is from the Introduction by Anne Sebba who is a British biographer, lecturer and journalist...and has written several introductions to reprinted classics.
• ‘The Squire’ written over a period of some 15 years... From 1921, when her first child was born, until 1930 when her fourth and last arrived, she made extensive notes on her experiences of childbirth and of motherhood. Later, as she watched the gradual loosening of maternal ties she realized that she wanted to write not only about birth but also to explore in detail the intimate and growing relationship between the mother and her family, This, she believed, had never before been attempted in a novel. Most importantly, she wished to describe her own attitudes towards mioddle age with respect to sex and the family. But, although always described as a novel, the serious effort to discover the motivations of a mother and the instincts of children leads ‘The Squire’ close to the realms of documentary.

One thing I like about Virago Modern Classics is that almost always there is an Introduction included with the classic in the reader can learn quite a bit about the book and/or its author, as with this book. I have thought about devoting a whole shelf to Virago Modern classics to my library (I already have a shelf of Persephone editions) and I think I will do that! 🙂 🙃 NOTE: I just learned this is also in a Persephone edition. I’m not surprised!

In this novel the main character, called The Squire, thinks quite a bit about women who have had children versus younger women who are still gallivanting around in different romances with men (Caroline, a next-door neighbor). There’s also a butler, a parlour maid, a cook, cook’s helper, and a Nurse (appears to be a governess), as well as the midwife who drops in to take care of her before, during, and for a period of time after the birth.

She described the pains of childbirth and how the fear of it exacerbated it, and that if one just accepted it, that one could experience it as painful but as something else too. That was interesting to read:
• Pain is but a branch of sensation. Perhaps child-birth turns into pain only when it is fought and resisted? I’m aching, I’m restless, I can’t tell you now. But there comes a time, after the first pains have passed, when you swim down a silver river running like a torrent, with the convulsive, corkscrew movements of a great fish, threshing from its neck to its tail. And if you can marry the movements, go with them, turn like a screw in the river and swim on, then the pain...then I believe the pain...becomes a flame which doesn’t burn you.
“Awful!” said Caroline, shuddering.
“It’s not awful. The thing’s progressive. And when you are right in the river to marry the pain requires tremendous determination, and will, and self-belief. You have to rush ahead into it, not pull back against it. It’s very hard to do.”
“Did you manage it last time?”
“No. But I got moments. And they were very clear afterwards. It’s clear to me now...”

Reviews:
• https://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2013/...
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...
• https://theliterarysisters.wordpress....

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it takes ages to commit to a book… and other times I’m at a bookstore picking something else up, see one, read half of the inside cover and the first line of the preface and think “that’ll do.” This was one of those. Which is to say I had no expectations. It’s my second time reading a Persephone book, and the first was nothing to write home about, if that counts as an expectation. I had never heard of the author (though it turns out she wrote National Velvet and I read a chapter or two of that when I was a kid). I didn’t even read the promotional blurbs, so I missed Margaret Drabble saying “imagine To the Lighthouse narrated by Mrs Ramsay expecting her fifth child.” And I hadn’t yet read the introduction, so I was also unaware of HG Wells’ assessment: “I feel as if I’d been attacked by a multitude of many-breasted women.”

So this is a novel about childbirth and rearing, originally published in 1938. I suppose this could limit its appeal (though it would be interesting to count how many novels about male mid-life crises I’ve read because they are “literature”). Moreover, it’s a depiction of an upper-class woman giving birth, with a host of servants to keep things running and a live-in midwife for a month, so it’s hardly documenting a universal experience. Even so, Bagnold was ambitious, she kept copious notes over fifteen years, she writes about the pain of childbirth, the separation of souls, the beginning of life, the coming to terms with death, the loss of interest in sex, the satisfactions of middle age, the loss of lustre to love affairs and the peculiarities of relationships with peculiar children, maternity as a physical vs as a lived experience. She felt this had not been attempted in fiction before, and I am with her that it had certainly never been attempted like this.

The Woolf comparisons aren’t out of place. There’s plenty of stream of consciousness, shifting points of view, the mother’s consciousness giving over to the kitchen maid’s as she passes her in the hall. The writing quality is excellent, much, much better than I would have expected.

The eyes of her mind lowered their lids, and she glanced with them at the embryo, impersonal, saying nothing to her, the companion. She had no tenderness for it, only the keenest expectation. It had no youth, it was old, filled with instinct… It had nothing to do with the born baby that was to fall with a crash from age to trembling youth, that, once born, would throw up its mastery and lie, shocked and naked, just within the gates of the world.

The book is a product of its time. There are gender assessments many of us would not agree with, it’s white, it’s upper class, it has theories on childbirth that are frankly a bit new-agey and theories on breastfeeding that are no longer in fashion (though I have to wonder why my own experiences have involved being enslaved to a slumbering infant 22 hours a day when I could get it on a schedule and then park it in the garden with a “cat-net” on top!) but it’s also direct, unapologetic and deeply eccentric. Not a timeless classic, but a splendidly-written footnote. “In many ways I think I did get it right,” Bagnold wrote after the fact. “I’m sad more people haven’t read it.” Me too.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bumped up from 3 to 4 just because of the radical nature of the subject matter for its time, and the fact that HG Wells (that bloody awful man) said the book made him feel as though he’d been ‘thrown into a washing basket full of used nursery napkins’.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's nothing so superficially glorified or intrinsically maligned as childbirth. Cis men in power still argue that those with wombs have less rights to their bodies than do corpses, autistic Chinese toddlers are scooped up by white couples for the sake of views on Youtube and just as swiftly abandoned, and we must do everything for the sake of the children except for granting paid parental leave during the most important period of infant development. With that in mind, it would be easy to think that this book, calmly and explicitly writing about breastfeeding eight decades before this "modern" time of mind that can never see a boob in public unless it is grotesquely sexualized, would be a breath of fresh air. Indeed, I can see that it has been for other readers, and I don't begrudge them that. There's much to be found on a meditation on life, death, ageing, (archaic) gender norms and relations, love for children, and much else that is commonly involved in domestic pursuits. However, I personally don't find such themes all that appealing when viewed through that particular lens, so for me, this is less a tale of glorious motherhood and more one of bemoaning the changing times that will shift this Downton Abbey-esque narrative from comfortable servitude to frightful individuality; frightful, at least, to the esteemed squire, but when considering the obsessions, addictions, and dissatisfactions of those around her who deliver, clean, and feed her children, it was a long time coming. So, single woman admirably runs her estate while giving birth to her fifth child? True. Single woman does so without consequences that could be easily mitigated by the sympathy that she crows about so frequently in reference to her children being applied to everyone else? Not true, and that is not one of the critical views the narrative so delights in bolstering.

I've seen at least one list of modernist works that incorporated this, and that's something one could argue. The prose veers plenty from the straight and narrow in the manner of stream of consciousness, and I imagine at least one accusation of obscenity was leveled at it just at the cusp of WWII. Now, one wouldn't normally call an author whose most popular work was in excess of 25k ratings buried, but when the second most popular work, aka this one, has 25700% less ratings, one begins to wonder at how easily Bagnold was socketed into the one-hit-sentimental-children's-work-wonder in later years. So, all that, coupled with the Virago Modern Classic green and a more mercenary intent of getting the exact right publication year, led me to scoop this up with admittedly some reservations about the subject material. Unfortunately, it was the latter that won out for me, but that doesn't mean I don't think the usual self-proclaimed buried/modernism/etc experts on this site have little excuse when it comes to the fact that I don't see their names in the community reviews. As I've already gone over, the themes are rarely covered in whatever contemporary works are considered "literature" these days, and the manner in which they are evoked here certainly makes it stand out from the crowd in a quality way. However, it's extremely hard to ignore the complacent self-satisfaction riddled throughout the narrative when it comes to the main character's thoughts and feelings. Brief snippets of other character's viewpoints and the ongoing descriptions of children and baby, admittedly adorable at times, don't diversify the narrative enough for strengthening purposes, so if you agree with the character's(/author's) viewpoints, you got it made. If you end the work feeling more sympathy for the alcoholic butler, than the newborn child, well. Not much to be done about that.

This is one work where my inclination towards the VMC green didn't go my way, but considering how I just reviewed one that wrested the rare five star from my clutches, it's not wise to ignore the forest for the trees. A number of this work's characteristics involving theme, chronology, and narratology put it beyond the pale, and when taken together, this is a very singular work that has a high chance of being absolutely marvelous to the right person. When it comes to my tastes, I've had a lack of tolerance for a certain level of blithe whiteness for some time now, which recent developments have only exacerbated; and this, despite all unique attributes, is verily drowned in it. So, a comparably but tad more instinctively satisfying experience than Year Before Last, but YBL, when it was good, it was very very good, and this, for all its literary machinations, had a habit of unconcernedly trundling. Wholesome trundling, to be sure, but when the infrastructure for generating such is so blatantly imbalanced across the human spectrum, it's difficult to feel unreservedly good about it.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has become one of my favorites. Bagnold writes beautifully of motherhood, labor, birth, aging, and mortality. "This short, this fearful loveliness, in which men and women, heroic and baffled, struggling to wisdom, age as they struggle; wrestle upwards and drop into the ground. This marriage, this association with matter, what a high-handed experiment, but what admirable victims! Man, with his eye on death, draws his foot from the womb. There is not time for anything, yet there is time for everything. No sooner appreciate love than skin withers, no sooner grow wise than we are unfit for wisdom. Learning to live and defeated by death. Discovery succeeds discovery, and nothing accumulates. We live haunted. We grasp and grasp; what we hold dissolves, our very hands dissolve."

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enid Bagnold’s The Squire, first published in 1938, was one of Persephone’s two new additions for Autumn 2013. The novel’s preface has been written by Anne Sebba, and is both informative and well constructed. The Squire was written over a period of ‘some fifteen years’, and was informed by the births of Bagnold’s four children between 1921 and 1930. As Sebba states, ‘she [Bagnold] realised that she wanted to write not only about birth but also to explore in detail the intimate and growing relationship between the mother and her family. This, she believed, had never before been attempted in a novel’. She goes on to say, ‘most importantly, she wished to describe her own attitudes towards middle age with respect to sex and the family’.

The squire of the book’s title is the middle aged mother of a family, whose position within it whilst her husband is away on his yearly jaunt to Bombay is as an omnipotent matriarch. She is ‘both the dispenser of punishment, and the provider of fun’, which draws parallels with Bagnold’s own life. The squire, Sebba states, has been ‘cast in the same mould’ as her creator.

Bagnold sets the scene marvellously from the first. The opening line paints an incredibly vivid picture: ‘From the village green where the Manor House stood, well-kept, white-painted, the sea was hidden by the turn of the street. The house’s front, pierced with windows, blinked as the sun sank… Sunset and moonrise were going on together.’ The house itself is like a character, and Bagnold treats it with the utmost respect throughout. She sets the scene further when she writes the following: ‘The house, now masterless for a month, was nearly, too, without a mistress, for she, its temporary squire, was heavy with child, absent in mind’.

In her confinement, the squire spends much time with the four children she already has – Jay, Lucy, Boniface and Henry. The house is staffed and the children have their own nurse, who ‘felt pride in her heavy squire, her argumentative, provoking squire’. Bagnold marvellously demonstrates the hierarchy of the house, even showing the disparities between the wealth of servants who are sent about the house on the merest whim. The characters are described realistically and rather originally. The squire, for example, ‘who had once been thirsty and gay, square-shouldered, fair and military, strutting about life for spoil, was thickened now, vigorous, leonine, occupied with her house, her nursery, her servants, her knot of human lives, antagonistic or loving’. Caroline, the squire’s neighbour and friend, is ‘lovely and restless, victim and adventurer’.

Throughout, Bagnold’s writing is beautiful and full of power. It is even haunting sometimes – for example, within the description she gives of the unborn baby: ‘its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant… secret eyes, a diver passed in albumen, ancient and epic… as old as a pharoah in its tomb’. The novel is a quiet one in terms of the events it describes, and the little action within it is very focused upon the confines of the house. The strength of it lies in Bagnold’s writing and characters, as well as the way in which she portrays relationships so well, particularly between the young siblings. She is an incredibly perceptive author, and this is a marvellous book with which to begin reading her oeuvre. Its complexities are great, and Bagnold is a master in things left unsaid. Some of the scenes which she captures, particularly those which involve the new baby, are incredibly vivid. It goes without saying too that the Persephone edition has been beautifully produced, endpapers and all.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Squire is a book which has more recently been re-issued by Persephone books, my edition however a nice original Virago green. Enid Bagnold – the author of four adult novels was also the author of the famous children’s story National Velvet. In this novel she celebrates childbirth and motherhood and the changing nature of a woman’s life – her prose is richly sensuous, languorous like the slow, contented movements of a woman heavy with child.

“The children seemed to cast their Precursors like shadows about the house, sometimes tangibly, in the sound of a voice, sometimes by suggestion, because it was striking the hour for their return from a walk, sometimes mysteriously, because inside the shell of their mother’s head the children were painted like angels on the roof of a chapel.”

A largely plotless novel – never a problem for me – it is a novel of astute observation nevertheless, with some brilliantly drawn child characters. To be honest I wasn’t certain how I would get on with this novel – I am very happily childless – on the face of it this was a novel that was likely to irritate me. However – I actually loved it – I loved it more as it went on, and it probably took me about forty pages to properly settle into it – but I actually surprised myself with how much I enjoyed The Squire.

The Squire of the title is the lady of the house – The Manor House on the village green, in her husband’s temporary absence abroad she becomes the squire. The household; which include the ageing butler Pratt, cook, a couple of maids, the squire’s four children and their Nurse await the imminent arrival of a new baby. The cook is not a great fan of new babies – and takes the opportunity to leave – so the squire hurriedly looks for a replacement – a decision needing to be made quickly. Pratt the butler is a world weary old retainer; he views his temporary squire with irritation, which he is too self-serving to allow to show. Pratt dreads the new cook – he’s seen all this kind of thing before.

Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic book that deserves to be much better known. The book follows the narrator, a mother of 4 nicknamed "The Squire" because she is in sole charge of her household of kids and servants while her husband is away on his annual business trip to India. What's different this time is that his absence coincides with his wife's confinement. During the space of a few weeks before and after giving birth, this strong and competent woman deals with various crises involving her staff (the cook resigns, the substitute butler has to be sacked for drinking, and a maid for stealing bits and bobs) while engaging in long conversations with her neighbor and friend Caroline, a woman addicted to romance and afraid of motherhood. While obviously fulfilled by her maternal role, the squire protests just a little bit too much about her lack of regrets for the carefree life of a single woman. Bagnold was justly proud of having managed to sustain a long narrative devoted exclusively to the intimate thoughts and physical sensations of a heavily pregnant woman. Bagnold uses striking imagery to convey the state of mind of her character and her relationship with her fetus,and then with her new-born. She is equally good at sketching domestic scenes involving one or more of the children. Many passages are incredibly poetic, making this as funny as "The Diary of a Provincial Lady" but also more profound.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like it but found it rather tedious.

[Colleen Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read anything written more than a few years ago so this was a nice change of pace. I especially like how focused it is--just a few days in the squire's life, so the reader sees every minute detail surrounding the birth of her fifth child. The squire herself has a very, very active inner life (very focused on mortality, too, which got me thinking she would die in childbirth but rest assured this does not happen). She has given over her daily life to her children and household so completely that the narrator calls her "the squire" and never mentions her actual name, but the reader's vantage into her head reveals a feisty, irritable, and methodical personality. I like her. A couple quotes relating to the squire's children because this book was full of fantastic tidbits, particularly to do with Boniface and Jay:
"Occasionally, very rarely, there was something Boniface desired to possess. Then he would signal, with pursed lips, nodding yes he wanted that...He had found, after months, what satisfied him. Sometimes, after such a find, he could not even digest the next meal...and literally sick with satisfaction he would lie in his bed, his red face drained of blood, unable to stir his head, his treasure perched on the corner of the chest-of-drawers, waiting with speechless patience for the dizzy misery to pass" (60).
"Jay like Boniface had his own hard-working private life. Jay filled in coupons and received each morning a post from people who sent him samples of toothpaste, lip-salve, Lactagol, staples, and once a rubber contraption which the squire, in a burst of courage and resolution, explained to him. (But he forgot again)" (155).

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most obvious thing about this unique book is how wrong the title is. It's very misleading. The novel is a paean to motherhood, especially pregnancy, labour, birth and the immediate time afterwards. There's a lovely dreaminess to Enid Bagnold's prose, it's both hazy and intense. The novel is most likely based on the author's experiences. The squire is the woman of the house, her husband is away in Bombay while she runs the large household of four children and numerous servants. Key staff include the midwife and later the Nurse. The squire's thoughts and physical condition are the close focus of the first half, including her interactions with her children, a very entertaining brood. With the safe delivery of the infant , our attention switches to how newborns behave. Enid Bagnold describes this with great realism, it's just adorable to use a doting mother/reader's words. It's a sustained account of this four week period of that most basic part of life, childbirth. Published in 1938, I've never read anything like it.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The "squire" is actually a wife and mother (quite posh, as she's Lady something) who is a forceful head of her household of four children and seven servants while her husband is away for several months. This is a novel about family life but without the usual two parents, and focusing strongly on birth and motherhood, as the squire (she's not named) is heavily pregnant at the beginning and has her baby in explicit detail for the era (1938), followed by many descriptions of breastfeeding.

Women who have given birth will probably enjoy this most, but the children are adorable, especially the single-minded Boniface, a boy of perhaps six or seven.

[Susan Dillon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old fashioned in style -- I think the novel was set in the 1930s, but it could have been set much earlier because there are absolutely no references to current events, fashion or popular culture. Perhaps that is one of the points of the novel: that the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood never change essentially. I was moved by "the squire's" appreciation of the individuality of each of her growing children and of her awareness of her own mortality as she gives birth for the fifth time and sees her children growing away from her a little bit every day.

[Susann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked some of the child birthing and rearing observations, especially her conversation with Lucy at the very end, but I had little interest in her other ideas. If you can get over the class thing (which is a huge task as you think about all the mothers raising their young without quite so many employees), Bagnold's portrayal of the servant problem is fascinating.

[James Askari · Rating 5 out of 5]

The titular 'squire' is not the male owner of a home, but an upper-class woman, mistress of a house in Sussex by the sea, overseeing a butler, nursemaid, cook, staff and four children, and about to have another. Bagnold describes the texture of mothering, the joys and travails of having a young family, and the children's own joys and obscure pains, more extensively and lyrically than perhaps anyone had described them before. The mind makes 'visitations' to the world of matter, sleeping and rising and caring and suffering, in its 'incandescence of salt and water and oxygen' it calls life.

The novel is woman- and mother-centred. The squire's husband is away on business to Bombay throughout the action. The butler Pratt, an intimate 'friend-enemy', is a quiet misogynist, disdaining maids, who would let the place slip to ruin if he could. His holiday replacement, suave and nimble as a bishop, turns out to be an alcoholic, and is dismissed by the squire on a Monday with a week's pay. Another maid is caught stuffing purloined oddments, an eggcup, glass, a child's watch in her suitcase, but 'never money', she is defiant. The squire has a visitor, a symbolic embodiment of her at an earlier stage of her life, but still a 'love-woman', with one man in Paris and another, her first lover, she is discomfited to meet; the midwife, 'narrow and virginal' and the 'guardian' of babies, sends her out of the nursery as the atmosphere she brings isn't right for a newborn. Her belief is that he--a boy, the squire's fifth child--will be the person he is in the crises of middle-age in consequence of his first two weeks.

The plot is exiguous at the level of a chapter, even a paragraph, but in terms of sensation, sentiment, experience, the sentences are huge. The squire's children are sharply individualised. The only girl, Lucy, adores the peculiar self-possession of Boniface, the second-eldest. She is in danger of loving her mother too much, always harping on her mother's age--forty-four--and eventual death. The youngest, Henry, chatters and makes a fire of twigs in a flowerpot. Boniface himself is one of the imperishable entre-deux-guerres literary characters. He tells the squire nothing, not asking for help, sticking to his habits--always suet pudding when there's fish. Perhaps looking for his 'wheels', a bobbin with a cog he carries round, he wades into the frog pond and gets out. The squire absent-mindedly listens as he reads out from his boys' magazine about how they're bombing the villages in Iraq--only commenting that he reads well now.

[Brandee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I so, so looked forward to this book. It seemed to have all I wanted: pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and details about the emotions and domesticity of each phase set in 1930s England. But I didn't much care for it, though I dog-eared many pages for perfectly sublime passages with which I could relate. I did get some sense, from those, of a "private" sharing which usually wasn't recorded in writing of that time period. Even today, if you talk too much about your own birthing and motherhood, if feels indulgent enough to make a woman keep a lot to herself, or to her journals, as I have always done. The squire had so much help, too much, so that I really couldn't get a true sense of her personality. The whole book seemed choppy, which at first I thought may be due to the actual edition that I have, which is a Virago Modern Classic from the 1980s...the field of text is tiny with huge margins all around and having to turn pages constantly didn't help this book to flow cohesively at all. Maybe the Persephone edition is better. That said, I always make it a policy to skip any foreword or commentary in the beginning until AFTER I read the book to stay open and uninfluenced by anything else. I did that this time, too and after an unsatisfying finish, I read Anne Sebba's introduction and found out that much of The Squire was based on journals kept by the author over a span of 15 years, which validated much of my perceptions. For all the keen observations about middle age, fear of dying, and the spirituality and exhaustion of motherhood, no "story" ever emerged and some characters like Caroline seemed to appear merely as a vehicle for various journal entries chosen to put in the book. That sort of thing happened many times, in my opinion, resulting in what sounded like mini-debates or persuasive essays rather than genuine conversation between friends. I wonder what just reprinting the actual journals would have been like? That sounds better to me, because there truly are some gems in this strangely arranged tale.

[Maire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look into the process of pregnancy and childbirth through the eyes and thoughts of a mother of four about to have her fifth child. Interestingly, she is currently running her small estate on her own while her husband is traveling abroad for business. I loved seeing the world through her eyes, and really admired her courage and thoughtfulness about motherhood. The book’s strengths and weaknesses are both due to the unusual point of view--the book is mostly told through her stream of consciousness, which means that there are lots of time when the narrative gets dropped or confused. Usually I don’t mind this style--and sometimes I even love it--but for some reason it didn’t work the entire time for me. This may be because sometimes it felt too forced and other times it felt too distracted. However, I still found the read compelling and very eye-opening!

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it and found the subject of the book interesting. I did find Bagnold's prose a bit flowery and high blown at times. The topic of childbirth and motherhood in general was engaging to read about and I wish that there were more novels exploring it in a fictional way. I felt that my judgment of Bagnold's novelist's skills were some what clouded by notions that she is not highly thought of critically.

[Rita]

1938
Bagnold is known for her National Velvet, which I doubt I ever read.
LRB reviewing a different author and book, contrasts that book with The Squire, an early treatment of motherhood that so seldom was seriously treated in fiction.

The reviewer [Adam Mars-Jones] likes this book very much, as do a few goodreaders.

[Charlotte Fairbairn · Rating 5 out of 5]

For mothers, wives, lovers of great writing, this is a majestic read. Full of amazing insights about children; very funny about the travails of being an employer; wonderful about womanhood. I recommend this with the only reservation that women/mothers will relate to it more than men might.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a domestic little book about a woman who is pregnant for the Nth time. The men are away. I found it really cozy and charming. I own two copies, one in paper and one hard cover (it was originally titled "The Door of Life").

[Mumzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compare this to The Pastor’s Wife by E. Von Arnim.

[Kay Robart · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my review here:

https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2016...

[Belinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't *love* the squire herself, and some of the side characters were less than interesting, but the descriptions of motherhood and child rearing were beautiful.

[Alexandra Daw · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is bizarre that I should read this book so closely to having listened to the BBC dramatization of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. On reflection, each shows up the afflictions/salvation of gender and class.

Marcel searches for love ceaselessly, wandering lonely as a cloud and I would suggest has just a teeny weeny bit of an Oedipus complex. He is truly awful to Albertine and you wonder why one earth she puts up with him. But does she? We will never know because we only know Marcel's twisted, tortured, jealous mind, inventing deceit at every turn. Marcel lives in fear of death every day, worried he will never see his novel reach the light of day. The novel he hasn't even begun to write.

In contrast we meet The Squire, a heavily pregnant woman, expecting her 5th child imminently. She is dubbed the Squire by her household staff, in the absence of her husband who is traveling on business. Here is a woman reconciled to her mortality, seeing herself as part of a procession of women, forming an archway for the continuation of life.

The staff are, in part, revolting. The cook doesn't care for birth and is thinking of leaving. The butler is intransigent and lazy. All hope rests on the arrival of the "divine" midwife who rules with a rod of iron, albeit temporarily, to ensure a good start for the baby and mother, in terms of a routine and feeding.

The Squire has an unmarried friend nearby who provides a counterpoint to her domesticity and invites philosophical discussions on the nature of the feminine and the masculine and love. Some of the discussion may seem quaint given the setting but much of it I think is still relevant to the never-ending philophical debate about gender roles and motherhood.

The opening chapter observing the youngest child in the bath, unconscious of the crown slipping from its head, is a delight as are all the observations of the children's personal idiosyncracies.

Have a read. See what you think.

[Lisa of Hopewell]

I learned of this book here: https://madamebibilophilerecommends.w...

[PJ Pfeiffer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful book I actually hated it so much. Barely anything happened. So stupid.

[Grier · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[John Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost a 5, some all-timer sentences, beautiful book

[Kaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel stands the test of time. Every page had a passage worth highlighting. Easily one of my favorite books on motherhood.