Just finished this on my plan to try and read every Perspehone Book. real delight the book keeps saying about how old she feels and she is 46. great insight into how we fail to understand our children. Might choose for book group. Very funny as well
Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan, our Spring 2006 novel, has the same theme as Persephone Book No 41, Hostages to Fortune, a great Persephone favourite: it too is about a woman bringing up a family who is left at the end, when the children are on the verge of adulthood, asking herself not only what it was all for but what was her own life for? Yet the questions are asked subtly and readably.
Having shown us how everything is made bearable for Patricia if her children can be at the centre of her life and, more important (because she is not a selfish woman) if they grow up to fulfil her ideals, Joanna Cannan proceeds to show us her happiness being slowly destroyed. In Princes in the Land the tragedy of the book is that not only do none of the three children live up to their mother’s expectations, she has to watch as each of them takes a path that is anathema to her. Yet of course, she can do nothing about it; nor, sensibly, does she try.
Joanna Cannan began writing early, and her first novel was published when she was 26 (by coincidence, at exactly the same age as Diana Gardner, our other March writer, was first published). From 1922 onwards she published a book a year for nearly forty years – novels; detective novels, including the very successful Death at The Dog, which is in print in America; and the first ‘pony’ book (first in the sense that the focus was on a pony-mad girl rather than a horse or pony), a genre that her daughters Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson were to make very much their own. Princes in the Land is about an interesting and rarely-discussed theme; it is also evocative about Oxford.
Joanna Cannan ‘lived enthusiastically’ and wrote novels that were ‘witty, satirical, even cynical. She presented clashes between idealists and materialists, with no easy solutions’ writes the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (making Joanna Cannan the twenty-sixth of our writers to have an entry in that great dictionary); this is the book of hers with a thematic bite that Persephone readers will find hard to forget.
Having shown us how everything is made bearable for Patricia if her children can be at the centre of her life and, more important (because she is not a selfish woman) if they grow up to fulfil her ideals, Joanna Cannan proceeds to show us her happiness being slowly destroyed. In Princes in the Land the tragedy of the book is that not only do none of the three children live up to their mother’s expectations, she has to watch as each of them takes a path that is anathema to her. Yet of course, she can do nothing about it; nor, sensibly, does she try.
Joanna Cannan began writing early, and her first novel was published when she was 26 (by coincidence, at exactly the same age as Diana Gardner, our other March writer, was first published). From 1922 onwards she published a book a year for nearly forty years – novels; detective novels, including the very successful Death at The Dog, which is in print in America; and the first ‘pony’ book (first in the sense that the focus was on a pony-mad girl rather than a horse or pony), a genre that her daughters Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson were to make very much their own. Princes in the Land is about an interesting and rarely-discussed theme; it is also evocative about Oxford.
Joanna Cannan ‘lived enthusiastically’ and wrote novels that were ‘witty, satirical, even cynical. She presented clashes between idealists and materialists, with no easy solutions’ writes the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (making Joanna Cannan the twenty-sixth of our writers to have an entry in that great dictionary); this is the book of hers with a thematic bite that Persephone readers will find hard to forget.
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