Chekhov in the home counties

Dorothy Whipple was once a highly regarded bestselling novelist and it is typical of the excellent Persephone books that they have restored her glory within their elegant silver jackets and distinctive floral end papers.

In They Were Sisters, with its, surely intentional, Chekhovian undertones, Whipple explores the fortunes of three sisters: Lucy, Charlotte and Vera. Lucy is clever and studious but must abandon her intellectual aspirations when their mother dies and, in the custom of the times (the novel is set in Thirties Britain), Lucy, as the eldest, becomes duty-bound to raise her siblings. Charlotte is sensitive but wilful and, dis- regarding all the signals, marries an out-and-out rotter, while Vera, an egocentric beauty, marries a mother’s boy and a bore. The only one of the three who remains childless, Lucy finally makes a sound marriage to William, who loves and respects her as an equal. With nothing more troubling than companionable contentment to engage her, Lucy’s creative energies continue to focus on her sisters and their marriages, which are made a long way from heaven.

The most original, and compelling, part of the story concerns Charlotte’s treatment at the hands of her husband, Geoffrey. Geoffrey is a sadist, who through steady disregard for the needs of anyone but himself drives his wife to drink and his children to disrespect and ultimately various states of alienation. Charlotte’s decline is painfully charted; she adores her brutal and brutish husband and Whipple is psychologically in the vanguard of her time in illuminating the perverse attachment of the victim to the torturer. The subtle way in which a misplaced devotion will often fuel its own destruction, and fire its object to renewed cruelties, is a truth revealed by Whipple with chilling accuracy.