Diana TuttonCritiques

Piquant but ultimately rather unsatisfying.
Set in the 1950s, I believe.
There are five daughters in the Harvey family. The eldest is recently married; the remaining four are unsure of what life holds for them. All they know is that their activities and friendships are severely curtailed by their parents, particularly their mother. They've grown up with this and are fairly content with it. Their parents encourage them in semi-intellectual pursuits, which helps them feel like they are happy. They all more or less recognize that they're not a "normal" family, but they willfully ignore exploring why, until it is forced upon them. Also mysterious to them is why their eldest sister was allowed to get married, when so much of the family life is centered around staying at home and never, ever rocking the boat.

Only a limited amount of resolution at the end.

Rather interesting characters, but kind of a cold book.

Protege a tus hijas (1953) puede leerse fácilmente como una divertida inversión moderna de Orgullo y prejuicio con un toque de Mujercitas, títulos ambos que se citan en la novela. Si en la célebre obra de Jane Austen una madre se desvivía por casar a sus hijas, aquí, dice uno de los personajes, «ni siquiera la mismísima señora Bennet lo conseguiría, a menos que contara con el apoyo de unos cuantos clérigos». La familia Harvey vive en un pueblecito no lejos de Londres justo en los años posteriores a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El padre es un escritor de novelas policiacas de éxito, muy celoso de su intimidad, y se pasa el día encerrado en su «vestidor». La madre, una belleza serena y delicada, tiene el hobby de pintar, come y cena muchas veces sola en su habitación, y hay órdenes tajantes de no alterarla en ninguna circunstancia. De sus cinco hijas, que nunca han ido a la escuela y se han educado en casa (no solo a base de Jane Austen y Louise May Alcott sino también de Gide y Proust), solo una se ha casado y vive en Londres. Las otras cuatro siguen viviendo en un mundo excéntrico y aislado, que a veces parece idílico y otras preocupante. Una de ellas, Morgan, va contando las pequeñas incidencias de su vida en común con jovialidad y ligereza, hasta que de pronto descubre que hay algo raro, quizá hasta cruel, en ese aislamiento. Diana Tutton, con su magistral uso del punto de vista, guía a su narradora para establecer con el lector, en un brillante ambiente de comedia, una grata complicidad, y para que los hallazgos perturbadores se produzcan para los dos –narradora y lector− al mismo tiempo.

"Mujercitas en extraño aislamiento familiar", J.M. Guelbenzu, Babelia 09.04.2020: https://elpais.com/cultura/2020/04/07/babelia/1586276119_647036.html

‘Guard Your Daughters’ is an interesting little book that took me awhile to track down, as it’s been out of print for some time. It’s about a family in rural England who have five daughters, all of whom are sheltered with the exception of the eldest, who is married and living in London. The book is told from the perspective of the middle child who is 19 or so, and her narrative voice is delightful. Through the trials and tribulations of dealing with siblings as well as trying to find someone romantically, she’s humorous and has that wonderful British way of putting things. The girls have been educated at home but are well cultured in classical music and literature, so there is an intelligence to their dialogue. There is also a lovely undercurrent of darkness in the book – something’s wrong with their mother, but Tutton is wisely subtle about it until the end. I loved that, but I confess I wasn’t quite as satisfied with the ultimate explanation. The general message, that over-protecting your kids is unhealthy, is interesting to see from 1953 as a prelude to the sixties.

Quotes:
On old age, apparently from Castiglione:
“Therefore (me thinke) olde men be like unto them that sayling in a vessel out of an haven beholde the ground with their eyes, and the vessel to their seeming standeth still and the shore goeth; and yet it is cleane contrarie, for the haven, and likewise the time and pleasures, continue still in their estate, and we, with the vessel of mortalitie fleeing away, go one after another through the tempestuous sea, that swalloweth up and devoureth all things, neither is it graunted us at any time to come on shore againe, but alwaies beaten with contrarie windes, at the end we breake our vessel at some rocke.”

On oneness and yet isolation:
“Mother came with me one day, and a walk with her is always a revelation as she sees all sorts of little things in the hedgerows that no one else would notice. Sometimes, too, she would walk for a few yards with her eyes shut, and her lovely tragic face upturned to the air, as though its touch upon her brought peace. Oh, darling Mother! If only I could have come near to her, could have understood her sorrowful isolation and relieved it with my love.”

On the past:
“I lay smiling in the dark. There were wonderful things ahead, and I would not look back or regret what was gone. ‘But,’ I thought with a pang, ‘we shall never really be a family again. That part is done, and it was everything while it lasted.
‘That part of our story is ended now.’”

On poetry:
“If I could really grasp that farm there, the walnut tree, the pond, the sky, the cold air, all those and the emotion they give me – Oh, Morgan, and those two horsemen coming slowly over the hill! If I could put it in a poem what it all does to me – the – the intensity of it, do you understand? Well, it wouldn’t matter if the poem lasted or was completely lost. I’d have done it. I’d have made something perfect.”

Total enjoyment!, 30 Sept. 2012
By
sally tarbox

Such a lovely book telling the story of the Harvey sisters, four of whom still live a rather reclusive existence at home, as Mother discourages visitors. Their efforts to capture a man and to lead their own lives in this eccentric family setting put me much in mind of the Mitford sisters' memoirs.
Very humorous in parts- I loved the eldest sister's observation on her younger sibling's attempt to find romance: 'You can't wait about for young men to drop from the sky and then...surround them.'
It's not all lightheartedness however, as a dark secret is gradually revealed...½

The Harvey sisters are unconventional, unschooled and oddly named they have been brought up at quite some distance from the rest of the world. Living with their famous detective writer father, and their fragile mother, they have been one another’s friends – with hardly any experience of people outside their family. Pandora the eldest has recently married and moved away to London – and this change seems to highlight for the sisters the peculiarity of their lives. Our narrator is Morgan, the nineteen year old middle sister, a pianist with a keen imagination. The eldest of the sisters still at home, and next in age to Pandora, is Thisbe, a beautiful and sharply tongued poet. A year younger than Morgan, is eighteen year old Cressida, sensible and domesticated, she seems most keenly aware of the oddities in the Harvey’s existence. The youngest sister is fifteen year old Teresa, romantic and dreamy she is very much the baby of the family.
Coming back to visit her family after her marriage, Pandora fears for her sisters – fears they won’t be able to marry or have lives of their own. Her removal from the family has increased her unease of the way the sisters have been brought up.
“I sighed. I knew where this was heading. Pandora had decided in her own gentle and inexorable way that poor Teresa ought to be at school. It was shame, I thought. I said: “Dearest, being married is making you very conventional. You never used to worry about our education.”
“I didn’t realise quite what anachronisms we all were. It’s so extraordinary that you all submit to this – this captivity.”
“But we’re all frightfully happy,” I said. “I can’t see that it matters. Have you talked to Thisbe like this?”
“Yes last night. She came back into my bedroom. She agrees.”
With their parents existing very much in the background, the five sisters have made their own entertainment and learnt to look after themselves and one another really very well. Their father divides his time between his writing and his wife, who he dances attendance upon constantly ensuring she is not upset. This fragile absent mother is a strange character, at first she appears merely cosseted and spoilt, her husband and daughters adoring her without question. The sisters have been sheltered from the world to a ridiculous degree, but when two seemingly eligible young men come into the sisters lives; their lack of social experience becomes obvious. However there are darker undercurrents to this unconventional household. Throughout this novel, woven into the humorous and charming story of the relationship between five sisters – there is a definite shadow. For me there was always something unexplained, remaining unspoken till the end. This element is brilliantly done, well plotted it adds something quite special to what could have been a fairly ordinary story. Yet the story is not ordinary, it’s heart-warming, funny and memorable, and the final twist utterly brilliant.
Guard Your Daughters is in many ways very like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle – a book which I have read twice, loved, and which continues to enjoy huge popularity. Diana Tutton’s first novel was published just a few years after I Capture the Castle, and in it, she appears to refer to the earlier novel in a scene about dressing for a cocktail party at the house of the local gentry. I think that Guard your Daughters is every bit as good as I capture the Castle and it is very surprising to me that it remains out of print. It is understandable that there are comparisons made between the two novels, Guard your Daughters has a similar feel to I Capture the Castle, it is a heart-warming nostalgic type novel. It is certainly the type of novel I can imagine re-reading, wanting to meet those sisters again and again. I do think, however, that Guard your Daughters has something more serious to say than I Capture the Castle. Tutton understands her characters beautifully; the gradual unravelling of the past and the motivations and consequences of the Harvey parents is possibly what sets it apart. I am so very glad I have had a chance to read this novel, and must thank Kerry from librarything again, for sending it to me.