Mothering Sunday begins with the phrase “Once upon a time,” but in Graham Swift’s newest fiction, fairy tales are not the story. They are the springboard. This slim volume pays its respects to fairy tales, and then quickly sets to growing out of them. By its second page, the novella—and what a novella it is—is sexy. Vibrant, focused, and brilliant, it is quite possibly Swift’s best work yet.
On a warm March Sunday in 1924, Jane Fairchild and Paul Sheringham meet for the last time. They have been lovers, secretly, for seven years. Paul, the only child in his family to survive the Great War, is the scion of the wealthy Sheringhams of Upleigh. Jane, a foundling raised in an orphanage into a life of service, is a maid at neighboring Beechwood. This Sunday, the fourth in Lent, is Mothering Sunday, when British Christians visit their baptismal churches or their nearest cathedrals, and even servants are free for the day.
Paul is irreverent, Jane is without family, and so the holiday is theirs to do with as they please. After Paul’s mother and father leave to lunch with the parents of his fiancée—not Jane, of course, but a woman of their son’s class—Paul drives his family’s servants to the train station, and he has the house at Upleigh to himself. He admits Jane (for the first and only time) through the front door, and the lovers climb the stairs to his bedroom.
Their assignation, for all its momentousness, will be short-lived; from the bed, Jane will watch Paul take his leave of her. She will enjoy the sight of his naked body even as he conceals it away, dressing himself, bit by bit, for a luncheon with his betrothed. Jane does not beg Paul to stay; he does not hurry her into leaving. Instead, he tells her how to lock up, and leaves her to explore the sprawling, empty home.
Here, Swift treats us to an artful generosity between characters. In a manner that will only be fully appreciated later, each lover exchanges a gift with the other: Jane allows Paul to drive off to his own appointed fate; Paul, in leaving Jane the way he does, allows her to emerge from his bed to wander, naked and solitary, through Upleigh House—a powerful, lasting intimacy, unthinkable for a maid.
The lovers will never see each other again. Life will never return them to this glorious, and particular, place. But for Jane, this Mothering Sunday of 1924 will always be remembered, with gladness, as the day she ceased to live “in service.” She will remember it as the day she was unmade, the day she became free to make herself.
According to Richard Ford, freedom ranks high among a novella’s most attractive features. As a literary form, the novella can be more liberal, more generous with characters, subplots, and settings than the short story. At the same time, novellas are not held to the same expectations as the novel. Not too big, not too small, the novella is free to focus on being just right.
But this is no easy task. In Mothering Sunday, Swift avoids narrowness, as well as sprawl, and what gives his novella its delicious, sustained tension is its willingness to confront its ostensibly conventional stories head on: Jane could be adopted by the family she attends at Beechwood—war has left them childless, and already they indulge her. Likewise, she could persuade Paul Sheringham to marry her, not his betrothed, or forgo her diaphragm and lay some claim to Upleigh through a child. Jane faces her thoughts, and their “constant mental hazarding,” as she wanders through the home Paul has left open to her. What makes Mothering Sunday rich is Jane’s ability to entertain these possibilities, but not become them. What makes Jane attractive is that, once liberated, she will not let the narrative force her back into service.
Jane Fairchild’s story will outgrow Upleigh. A disaster will speed her on her way. Yet Jane will take her losses, and gains, and move forward with confidence—even joy. She will leave Beechwood for Oxford and there, as a shopgirl, not a student, come to know the dons, marry, be widowed, and keep pressing on. After the death of her first husband she will become a well-known writer; at 98, still writing at the turn of the millennium, interviewers will find her fresh, playful, beguiling. They will ask her how she came to be a writer, and she will answer them: First, Stevenson and Haggard adventures in the Beechwood library, then Conrad’s Youth, which she’ll recall having finished on that Sunday evening in the spring of 1924.
Ian McEwan has called the novella prose fiction’s “beautiful daughter.” Mothering Sunday declares itself a romance, but it is most certainly a novella, and a beautiful one at that. In Mothering Sunday and Jane Fairchild, Swift personifies the form and has written British fiction a love letter.
Scott Dahlie is a postgraduate research fellow at the University of East Anglia. He edits prose at Lighthouse Literary Journal and is at work on a novel told in linked novellas.
