guard your daughters

Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton (Persephone, 2017; originally published by Chatto & Windus in 1953)

Guard Your Daughters is an interesting and engaging book.  In many ways, it’s familiar: an eccentric British family, the Harveys, have too many daughter — 5 in this case: Pandora, Thisbe, Morgan, Cressida, and Teresa (the mother lost interest in naming after the fourth daughter so poor Teresa was named by her less romantic father).  The Harveys life in self-elected poverty in a huge house outside of a small village.  Mr. Harvey is a very successful writer of mysteries, and his wife is a beautiful but extremely fragile woman who must be constantly catered to, cosseted, and comforted, for she has a great fear of losing any of her daughters to husbands or even to friends. There is something monstrous in the way she allows her infirmity to control the family, and something mysterious about the way they allow her to thwart their lives.  Any show of independence or interest or engagement with the outside world on the part of the daughters results in Mother taking to her bed with debilitating and dramatic hysterics.  So the girls are haphazardly and eccentrically educated at home and made to cook and clean and basically devote their lives to maintaining the domestic status quo.  

But when the oldest daughter, Pandora, meets a nice young man while teaching Sunday School and manages to quickly get herself married to him and removed to London, the mother’s iron grip is weakened, and the remaining daughters begin to rebel, and seek out men for their own.  The novel centers around their collective pursuit of two candidates and the disastrous effect this has on the family’s and the mother’s stability.

The novel is narrated by the middle sister, Morgan, and she does a good job revealing her family and their queer world to the reader, which often reminds us of two other famous British literary families: the Bennetts and the Mitfords. But beneath the idiosyncratic comic veneer lurks disturbing and dark shadows concerning Mrs Harvey’s health — unlike the Bennett or Mitford parents, her eccentricity is not benign, and the book shades darker as it concludes.

Tutton is a deft and vivid writer, and knows how to keep her work breezy but also textured and somewhat complex.  Her other two novels deal with incest and a woman’s affair with her son-in-law, and I’d be interested in reading both of them, as I feel that she tackles difficult  issues with a funny, rosy (yet thorny) touch.