52 pages • 1 hour read
Rosamunde PilcherThe Shell Seekers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Experiences of Great Love and Great Loss
As Penelope faces the end of her life, she reflects on the people and events that shaped her life. For Penelope, relationships are what she considers most often, including the relationship she saw between her parents as well as her own relationship with each of them. Additionally, she recalls the nuances of her first love with Ambrose, her great love affair with Richard, and the many friendships she made along the way.
Penelope’s childhood is carefree, a bohemian lifestyle that allows her freedom to explore the world around her while gaining an appreciation for art and nature through her father’s profession and the people her parents surround her with. Although her parents’ relationship was born in grief and sorrow due to the impact of World War I, they create a safe and comfortable world for Penelope. Watching the easy love between her parents teaches Penelope that great love is a possibility. This is why she so easily falls for Ambrose. Penelope meets Ambrose during a time when she is unhappy with her circumstances and homesick. Ambrose is the first man she is ever intimate with, and this experience lures her into the mistaken belief that she is in love with him. Only when Penelope and Ambrose marry does Penelope realize that she doesn’t truly love him. However, Penelope has made a commitment to their marriage and to her daughter: both things that make her feel as though she has no choice but to continue the relationship.
After the disappointment and disillusionment that comes from her doomed relationship with Ambrose, however, Penelope loses much of her naivete and becomes more worldly. The death of her mother also contributes to this transformation, as it teaches her about great loss and makes her a witness to the ways in which grief can change people, particularly her father. Losses shape much of Penelope’s world, for surviving the difficult circumstances of the war makes Penelope a different person. It is this new Penelope who meets Richard Lomax. The experience of Loving Richard and then losing him alters Penelope in a way that causes her to lose the carefree nature of her youth, but it also makes it possible for her to face the difficulties of being caught up in a loveless marriage. These experiences also prepare Penelope for the difficult relationships she will have with her grown children.
Just as Penelope reflects on her life, her daughter, Olivia, also looks back on hers, focusing on her one great love, with Cosmo. Olivia’s experience with love is the opposite of her mother’s. Whereas Penelope’s love for Richard comes during a time when Penelope must relinquish the carefree nature of her childhood, Olivia’s relationship with Cosmo allows her to experience a carefree lifestyle that she has never known. Cosmo’s life is more like Lawrence and Sophie’s. Filled with good friends and great books, Cosmo’s bohemian lifestyle is as much of a contrast with Olivia’s yuppie lifestyle as Penelope’s bohemian childhood was with Ambrose’s traditional life.
Greed and Anticipated Inheritance
A major plot element of The Shell Seekers is Nancy and Noel’s desire to sell Lawrence Stern’s paintings and use the money for their own personal gain. Nancy lives a lifestyle that requires more money than her husband’s work as a lawyer can generate, and Noel is similar to his father in that he has little interest in working but a great deal of interest in being wealthy. Neither Nancy nor Noel has any interest in earning money or investing wisely as Olivia has done since the beginning of her career. At the same time, Nancy and Noel both fail to recognize the sentimental attachment that Penelope has to her father’s paintings, and they both fail to understand the impact that these pieces of art could potentially have for the gallery, an art project Lawrence Stern helped to initiate in Porthkerris. For Nancy and Noel, Lawrence’s paintings are about money, but for Penelope they are a part of her history and a testament to her father’s legacy.
Greed is a theme that is seen throughout the novel, beginning with Ambrose. When Penelope and Ambrose first meet, Ambrose’s interest in Penelope is based on her stories of living in Porthkerris, traveling in France, and spending time in the house on Oakley Street. Ambrose is further entranced by the mention of Lawrence Stern’s car, a Bentley. Ambrose’s interest in Lawrence’s wealth reveals that his romantic interest in Penelope conceals selfish motives, and it is clear that he believes that by marrying Penelope, he will eventually gain access to the mountains of wealth he imagines her father to possess. However, Ambrose doesn’t see beneath the surface of these things. He doesn’t realize that the house on Oakley Street was an inheritance for Lawrence, that the Bentley is old and secondhand, or that the family survives by working hard and providing for themselves. This miscue leads to a loveless marriage and many struggles, forcing Penelope to sacrifice her childhood and her father’s legacy by selling the properties she inherited from her father so that she may be able to educate and provide for her children.
Ambrose’s sense of entitlement is a trait that he passes on to at least two of his children, for although Olivia learns to be invest her money carefully and use it wisely, Noel and Nancy are less careful. Nancy has great dreams of a romantic life, so she marries a man with a good reputation and lives in a home that projects respectability. However, the marriage is loveless, and the home is so expensive that Nancy cannot afford to keep it heated in the winter. Noel, like his father, would rather enjoy unearned wealth than be forced to work for it. He has big dreams of starting a new business but has no logical way to achieve those dreams other than to scheme to take his mother’s inheritance for himself. When his mother dies, Noel is so cold that all he cares about is the amount of money he inherits. Ultimately, greed, not love, is all that Nancy and Noel are able to understand.
Strains and Benefits of Parent-Child Relationships
As a novel in the romance genre, The Shell Seekers depends upon the complexities of its characters’ relationships. However, not all these relationships are romantic in nature. The first important relationship in anyone’s life is the parent-child relationship. Penelope’s relationship with her mother remains informal but deeply loving. She often expresses the sense that Sophie is more like her sister than her mother. In a way, the spirit of this idea is true, for Sophie was young when she had Penelope and lived through the tragedy of World War I, in which she lost her own parents. Sophie is such a loving person and so confident in her relationship with Lawrence that she is able to provide Penelope with a carefree childhood despite her own experiences with great loss. This relationship teaches Penelope that great love does exist, and it shapes her personality, making her a resilient and kind person.
When Penelope’s own daughter comes along, it is during a difficult time. Penelope has just realized she is not in love with her husband. The onset of World War II has created new struggles that Penelope has never experienced before. For these reasons, Penelope has trouble bonding with her new child. Although Penelope loves Nancy, and Nancy receives a great deal of love from Doris and others, there is difficulty in their relationship from the very beginning. The greatest losses that Penelope experiences in her life happen during Nancy’s infancy and toddler years. Penelope loses her mother, and then she falls in love with Richard and loses him, too. Penelope loses her father, as well, and finds herself stuck in a loveless marriage. Rather than give in to her grief, however, Penelope throws herself into raising her children, sacrificing many of the things she inherited from her parents to support them while their father gambles away the family’s money and ultimately abandons them for another woman. Yet, as often happens in such situations, the children idolize the parent who is not there and disregard the one who remains behind.
Not long before her death, Penelope’s children learn that there is value to the Lawrence Stern paintings that Penelope has cherished all their lives, and this topic becomes yet another source of strain between parent and children. Nancy and Noel pressure her to sell her own paintings for their personal gain, implying that she owes them such a sacrifice. This struggle brings out the worst in Penelope’s children, and both Nancy and Noel wound their mother by voicing their disappointments. Nancy accuses Penelope of never giving her anything, even though Penelope sold her beloved Carn Cottage long ago for her children’s benefit. Likewise, Noel tells Penelope that she failed her children, even though she protected them and gave them the skills they needed to become successful adults. In their behavior with their mother right before her death, Nancy and Noel allow the greed they learned from their father to color their relationship, first judging her for the hardships that Ambrose placed on her and then despising her for not giving up the last piece she has of her father in order to benefit children who are more than capable of making their own way in the world.
