The Boogie and Ginnie double act

Relationships between mothers and daughters are sometimes harmonious, often troubled, and always contradictory. Daughters want to break away, be independent, yet have the approval and advice of their mothers; their mothers, in turn, want to protect and defend their daughters, while willing them to stand on their own feet. This push-me-pull-you dynamic frequently remains unresolved.

Virginia Reynolds (nicknamed Boogie) was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1883, the daughter of former slave-holders and transplanted New Englanders (she was, proudly, a second cousin once-removed of Emily Dickinson). Her daughter, also Virginia (Ginnie), was born in 1908, and was given a cosmopolitan education that included a period in Biarritz and tuition in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and from Martha Graham. On what was planned as a brief visit to England, she met and married a Guards officer, and settled down to a county existence among the gentry.

Three decades of letters between the two followed, and, edited by Ginnie’s daughter, they paint a picture of daily life in a very specific socio-economic group between the 1930s and the 1960s. When the letters begin, Herbert Hoover was the president of the United States and Benny Goodman was making his first recordings; by the time they close, with Boogie’s death, Kennedy had been assassinated and the Rolling Stones were storming the charts.

Boogie was the more interesting character of the two, and immeasurably the better writer. She was cultured, she went to lectures, concerts, theatre (including the Ballets Russes, and Paul Robeson in Othello), and she read widely in history, literature and even philosophy, taking in the Existentialists in her sixties and defending Diderot to a friend at the age of 83.

Ginnie, despite her avant-garde New York theatrical phase, quickly took on protective colouring, becoming stalwartly dull and philistine.