Mothering Sunday

The year is 1924, and Jane Fairchild, a housemaid in a country house, is engaged in a long-running affair with the son of a nearby estate. Paul Sheringham, too young to have been killed in the war along with all of the other local young men, is due to marry another woman in a few short weeks, and this novel charts their last day – really only a few hours – together.

On one level, Mothering Sunday functions as a narrative about the English class system. Jane has a sphere of knowledge shared only by those who clean up after the gentry, picking up their discarded clothes, sweeping their floors, making their beds. Although she has been educated, and will go on to be a successful novelist, she is required to check with her employer whether the books she wants to read are suitable. She is unable even to ask a direct question about her lover’s whereabouts on a particular day. And yet the novel also shows subtlety as to where these barriers might be permeable. The relationship between Jane and Paul is not one of equals, and he would never think of her as a person to settle down with; nevertheless, it appears to be entirely consensual, and does not subscribe to the common narrative of a helpless maid seduced and exploited by her social superior. Jane clearly derives as much enjoyment from the relationship as Paul does, while knowing that it can’t last forever.

This is a lovely pearl of a novel, small but beautifully formed. The tone is gentle and dream-like, like an insect hovering lazily between the present, past, and future, revisiting the same scenes and adding touches to them in the way that human memory does. Swift builds images throughout the book that function as resting-points for this non-linear narrative, and continue to resonate after it is over: Jane naked in the kitchen after Paul leaves, wolfing down pie and beer; his ashtray on her bare stomach; a younger Jane summoning up her courage to ask her employer, Mr Niven, whether she might borrow books from his library to read; Paul’s maid changing his sheets later in the day. These images gain power from the perspective of a future Jane looking back, ruminating on the ripples that spread outwards from small moments in a life, until they come to influence its later course.