Mothering Sunday

Starred review from February 29, 2016
Set in 1924, in an England still reeling from the loss of young men to the Great War, this elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition. Its events unfold from the viewpoint of Jane Fairchild, a 22-year-old maid at the Berkshire estate Beechwood. On the titular day—a Sunday before Easter that the aristocracy traditionally give their help off to visit their families—Jane bikes to neighboring Upleigh for a final fling with Paul Sheringham, her wealthy lover for the past five years, who is soon to marry into another blue blood family. No one can anticipate that the day will end abruptly with a devastating tragedy—and, for Jane, an epiphany that marks the start of a future as rich and rewarding as it is unforeseen. The story lingers on the immediate aftermath of Jane and Paul’s tryst and Swift (England and Other Stories) invests its every detail—the order in which Paul hastily dons formal attire to lunch with his fiancé and their families, the casualness with which Jane explores his estate home in the nude—with gravity and symbolic weight. His depiction of a fragile caste clinging to traditions that define their sense of noblesse oblige while struggling to bear the era’s crushing burden of “accumulated loss and grief” is poignant and moving—as is his intimation of a brilliant personal destiny that rises from the ashes of a tragically bygone social order.

Starred review from February 15, 2016
In England of 1924, a maid who knows her affair with an estate owner's son must end moves through that last day with sly humor and sensual detail. Swift (England and Other Stories, 2015, etc.) subtitles this slim novel "A Romance" and begins it like a fairy tale, with the words "Once upon a time." It's the first of numerous ironies. Narrated in the third person from the point of view and stream of consciousness of housemaid Jane Fairchild, 22, the story moves through the closing hours of her affair with Paul Sheringham, 23, the only remaining child of parents who lost their two other boys during World War I. It's Mothering Sunday, when domestics traditionally visit their mothers. Not only is the help vacating the Sheringham premises, but Paul's parents are away on a lunch outing. Many languorous post-coital pages describe how Paul moves naked about his bedroom, how he and Jane share a cigarette in bed, and finally his getting up and dressed and on the road to meet with the woman he is to marry in two weeks. Then come many equally unhurried pages in which Jane wanders naked around the empty house. The one-day time frame is broken by flashbacks to her days as an orphan, her coming into service, and aspects of life above and below stairs. The narrator also steps in to share with the reader things Jane doesn't yet know: that she will die at 98 after a career as a famous novelist and that Paul, for reasons only a spoiler would reveal, will never marry. Jane is a marvelous creation who can seem wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty, bringing to mind Molly Bloom. Swift has fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first.

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Starred review from March 1, 2016
Two weeks before Paul Sheringham was to marry Emma Hobday, he summoned Jane Fairchild to his bedroom. The year was 1924, and Jane was given the early spring afternoon off from her duties as maid to the Nivens family. Instead of visiting her own family, for she had none, Jane bicycled to her lover's home, where they luxuriated in its extraordinary emptiness. But by the end of the day, Paul would be dead, his car wrapped around an oak tree, and Jane's grief would be a mystery to her employers. With oblique references to the surprising ways this peculiar day would influence Jane's long and remarkable career as a writer, Swift (England and Other Stories, 2015) unveils a lifetime of regret and longing, pride and mystique in a perfect gem of a novel. With his unmistakable gift for detailed exactitude and emotional subtlety, Swift lightly touches on weighty issues of loss and abandonment, boldness and survival. The antidote to Downton Abbey's prolonged manor-house soap opera, Swift's succinct rags-to-riches tale of a young woman's unexpected metamorphosis is a rich and nuanced evocation of an innocent yet titillating time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2015

One lovely day in March, Jane and Paul make love for the last time. Jane, servant in a great house in the waning Downton days of 1924, can no longer see Paul, a young man from the neighboring house about to be married. What happens next is not Jane's piteous unwinding but the story of an orphan who begins life in service and eventually becomes a great writer and mistress of culture. From the Booker Prize winner.

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