32 pages • 1 hour read
Graham SwiftMothering Sunday
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPages 50-99Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 50-60 Summary
Jane discusses how Ethel will have to clean up the stain on Paul’s bed. This leads her to remember how, before her time at Beechwood, she trained as a maid at a big house with five other maids; when discussing marks from sex, the maids referred to them as “nocturnal omissions” (51). Jane reflects on how Ethel, being unimaginative, will assume that the stain in the bed was due to Paul and Emma sleeping together.
Jane continues to watch Paul dress, noting how “she had never watched a man get dressed before” (53). Paul puts on his “Sunday best”—first his shirt, then cufflinks, a collar, a tie pin, and trousers—“as if he was dressing for his wedding” (57). Jane realizes it will be the last time that she sees Paul and tells him that he looks handsome. He does not tell her that she looks beautiful. Paul explains that his parents won’t be back until four o’clock and says that she can relax in the house until then, helping herself to pie in the kitchen and letting herself out afterwards. He then leaves the room without kissing her or saying goodbye.
Pages 61-70 Summary
Still lying in Paul’s bed, Jane reflects on the likely scene at the Swan Hotel, where Emma is waiting for Paul; she wonders whether Emma herself is always “maddeningly late,” causing her and Paul to arrive at the same time. She also thinks about the anodyne scene taking place among the various families in Henley. She then hears Paul’s car on the gravel of the drive, signalling his departure.
Jane gets up, still naked, and explores Paul’s bathroom. She thinks about the contraceptive cap Paul bought for her so that she would not get pregnant—something that would result in her “swift banishment” from Beechwood. Jane goes into the dressing room and looks at Paul’s clothes before walking onto the landing and down the stairs. She studies the paintings in the hall. Jane tries to make a mental inventory of the pictures so that she will be able to remember them when she is older. She wonders how long it will take Paul to forget this day.
Pages 70-81 Summary
Jane continues to explore the rooms at Upleigh, including a drawing room that seems “like a small deserted foreign country, a collection of pleading but abandoned possessions” (71). She then stands before the tall mirror in the hall, feeling that she is observing herself properly for the first time. Jane tries to imagine Emma’s naked body, wondering whether it resembles her own, but finds it impossible to picture Emma without clothes.
Jane ventures into the library, thinking about the library at Beechwood. Most of the books there have never been read, except for those on a small revolving bookcase containing titles “that harked back to childhood, boyhood or gathering manhood” (75), like Rider Haggard, G. A. Henry, and R. M. Ballantyne. Jane recalls asking Mr. Niven whether she could borrow books from the library. He agreed, although her choice of adventure books “for boys,” like Treasure Island, baffled him. She takes one of the books from the shelves at Upleigh and presses it to her breasts.
Pages 81-89 Summary
Jane goes down another set of stairs into the kitchen. She eats and drinks some of the pie and beer that had been left for Paul. She wonders whether Paul was deliberately late for his meeting with Emma to provoke a crisis. Jane also thinks about how Ethel will tell herself a story about Paul and Emma that explains the half-eaten pie and the stain on the bed. This would, Jane imagines, involve Emma making an unexpected visit to Upleigh and surprising Paul midway through his lunch before making love to him in the bedroom.
On ascending the stairs and entering the hall again, Jane notices that the clock says 2:20pm and then hears the phone ringing. She is frozen to the spot and does not answer, despite the phone ringing for several minutes. Jane then goes back to the bedroom and gets dressed. Before leaving, she takes one of the orchids in the hall with her.
Pages 89-99 Summary
Jane gets on her bicycle and rides away from Upleigh, reflecting on how being in the house marked a new starting point in her life. While riding, the wind rushing through her hair, she reflects that “she [will] never be able to explain the sheer liberty, the racing sense of possibility she [feels]” (92). She reaches Beechwood slightly after four o’clock, intending to read a book by Joseph Conrad that she has just started. There she finds Mr. Niven already home; he announces that he has some “distressing news” and says that Paul died in a car accident while driving to meet Emma.
Pages 50-99 Analysis
Decades later, after Jane has become a successful writer, she reflects on the lazy question that interviewers often ask her: “[S]o when—so how did you become a writer?” (96). Her usual response to it is to claim that she became a writer “at birth.” Since she was an orphan, with neither family nor name, her life was a blank slate. As such she was compelled from the very start to create and imagine in order to forge an identity for herself: “[S]he had come into the world with an innate licence to invent” (98). The circumstances of her childhood, and even the fact that her surname (“Fairchild”) was a fabrication generically given to orphans, set her up as a teller of stories and fictions, laying the groundwork for A Fascination with Language—one of the work’s key themes. However, as she also admits, this narrative is itself partly fiction. Like many such stories it is not entirely false, but the full truth, which Jane wants to keep secret, is that the seed of her becoming a writer was “truly planted in her[…] one very warm day in March, when she had wandered round a house without a shred on” (98)—that is, during her exploration of the house after Paul leaves to meet Emma.
This is in part a continuation of the point about Jane being an orphan. In the house she experiences a totally new and strange environment “like some visiting ghost” (98-99). This compels her to see things, including herself, in a radical new light. It inspires her to see the imaginative possibilities latent in the world and her relationship to them. For example, she imagines how Ethel, who will see “both pie and patch, might piece together a story” about what happened (84). Likewise, Jane tries “to imagine the scene” between Paul and Emma at the Swan Hotel (83)—how Paul might try to placate or dismiss her anger at his lateness. Then Jane pictures him pretending to work in the library, but instead lazing around and smoking. As she eats the pie, she imagines Paul similarly devouring it, “cheeks bulging, like some guzzling schoolboy or starving tramp” (82).
In this way, Jane realizes and recognizes in herself an essential attribute of any good writer: not merely the ability to picture scenes and possibilities but to live and feel them oneself. This is why Jane says that she eats Paul’s pie “as if she were him” (83). The scene illustrates the writer’s alchemy of, if only for brief moments, becoming somebody else. Further, this is the reason Jane’s nakedness is so important. In exploring the house without clothes, she is free to adopt different personas and play with different possibilities. By remaining undressed she is refusing to step back into prescribed social roles that would fix a certain perspective. Her nakedness allows her to remain a “ghostly” presence who, not tied to any particular identity or character, can inhabit others.
These social roles also explain why, as Jane says, “she couldn’t even imagine Emma without clothes” (73). For Jane, Emma symbolizes the stifling and rigid world of middle-class propriety. She epitomizes the inability to properly imagine—the unwillingness to step beyond the self and viewpoint that has been handed to her. A similar limitation appears with Ethel. Jane links Ethel’s sexual conservatism and inexperience—the fact she is a “maid” (64) in both senses—to the poverty of her imagination. Ethel is unwilling to be naked literally or figuratively and thus rigidly inhabits her maid’s identity. It is this that leads her, in Jane’s mind, to construct such a humdrum and implausible “story” to explain the mark on the bed and the half-eaten pie. The relationship between sexuality and creativity sheds light on the symbolic significance of the novel’s title; though Jane draws attention to the fact that she will not become a “mother” as a result of her tryst with Paul, the event is part of what makes her a writer.
In this way, Jane’s experience in exploring the house has both negative and positive dimensions. Its influence in revealing and awakening the power of her imagination, and thus her life as a writer, is based on a sense of what she is not as much as what she is. It shows the paths to avoid as well as hinting at those to pursue.
