The Painter's Daughters
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
A “beautifully written” (Hilary Mantel), “fascinating” (The Washington Post) story of love, madness, sisterly devotion, and control, about the two beloved daughters of renowned 1700s English painter Thomas Gainsborough, who struggle to live up to the perfect image the world so admired in their portraits.
Peggy and Molly Gainsborough—the daughters of one of England’s most famous portrait artists of the 1700s and the frequent subject of his work—are best friends. They spy on their father as he paints, rankle their mother as she manages the household, and run barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly periodically experiences bouts of mental confusion, even forgetting who she is, and Peggy instinctively knows she must help cover up her sister’s condition.
When the family moves to Bath, it’s not so easy to hide Molly’s slip-ups. There, the sisters are thrown into the whirlwind of polite society, where the codes of behavior are crystal clear. Molly dreams of a normal life but slides deeper and more publicly into her delusions. Peggy knows the shadow of an asylum looms for women like Molly, and she goes to greater lengths to protect her sister’s secret.
But when Peggy unexpectedly falls in love with her father’s friend, the charming composer Johann Fischer, the sisters’ precarious situation is thrown catastrophically off course. Her burgeoning love for Johann sparks the bitterest of betrayals, forcing Peggy to question all she has done for Molly, and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another.
A tense and tender examination of the blurred lines between protection and control, The Painter’s Daughter is an “engaging, transporting” (The Guardian) look at the real girls behind the canvas. Emily Howes’s debut is a stunning exploration of devotion, control, and individuality; it is a love song to sisterhood, to the many hues of life, and to being looked at but never really seen.
Reviews with the most likes.
The titular painter in this historical fiction novel is Thomas Gainsborough...if you think you don't know his work, you've probably seen Blue Boy. He also painted his daughters, Molly and Peggy, and they are, of course, the focus here. Peggy is the younger, by a year, but even as a young girl she feels a sense of obligation to her sister, who has episodes where she seems to forget who and where she is. Peggy is terrified her beloved Molly will end up in a madhouse and devises a system to keep Molly's condition hidden. This becomes more challenging when the family moves to Bath and the girls become teenagers. After a betrayal when they're in their 20s, Polly finds herself questioning everything she's done and struggling to figure out how to proceed. We also get some peeks into the life of Meg, a different girl living in a different time, whose story does eventually intersect with the main plot line but not until quite late in the proceedings. I found myself drawn into this book quickly, the voice Emily Howes creates for Polly is incredibly compelling. The love and fear she has for her sister, the anxiety she feels about keeping anyone from understanding the depths of Molly's issues, the way she sublimates that anxiety into feeling like she has to be good are all convincingly rendered. Polly feels like a girl, then an adolescent, then a woman. Since I'm a character reader, this went a long way towards making the book work as well as it did. The biggest issue for me was the Meg storyline. I understand why she included it, but I resented every time it pulled me out of the main narrative in which I'd otherwise been engaged. This is a very promising debut and I'm excited to read more from Howes!
