Sunday 7 September 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


Grandmother’s Footsteps

Problems of keeping mum

Charlotte Moore
Penguin, 274pp, £17.99,
Molly Guinness
Tuesday, 5th February 2008

Molly Guinness reviews Charlotte Moore's new book

Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let you go?’, but Charlotte Moore actually asks more interesting questions, and is intelligent enough to show that it is rather up to those left behind to decide whether or not to let the past go.

Evelyn, Verity and Hester are all very different; Evelyn was a suffragette and a woman of letters, Verity a mouse-like woman of no particular intelligence or ambition, and Hester is tidy with cool intelligence. I know this because the author tells us, not really because she shows us. There is a slight sense that she doesn’t know her own characters very well; Moore spends a good deal of time establishing Verity as an uninteresting, unadventurous person and then suddenly sends her off on a hair-brained project with little purpose or explanation.

1 | 2  Next page 

Subscribe now

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Comments

Post a comment


Your comment:*

Your name:*

Your email address:*
(We won't publish this)

*Required information

Please click the button only once - your comment will not be published immediately

Related articles

The châtelaine and the wanderer

Anne Chisholm

In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley

Rekindling life in a dead frame

Caroline Moore

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, by Peter Ackroyd

A far cry from Paradise

Anita Brookner

The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story, by James Buchan

The iceman cometh

Sara Wheeler

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis

Bright sparks of the Dark Ages

Tom Holland

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox

Spectator recommends

Sky TV, Broadband & Talk from £16 a Month

Sky TV & free broadband packages available from £16 a month. Choose from a standard free sky box, sky plus...


Spectator classifieds

ROME CENTRE

PORTA METRONIA, ROME Standing high on the top of one of the seven hills of Rome- the Coelian- this unique

City Breaks. ROME and PARIS

ROME and PARIS: over 350 holiday rentals apartments listed: visit  www.romanreference.com  and  www.parisreference.com or call +39 0648 903612.

Jewellery. RUFFS (Estd. 1904).

Goldsmiths by Design Welcome to Ruffs!  You have found a company of Goldsmiths that specialises in the manufacture, amongst other