The Painter's Daughters: The award-winning debut novel selected for BBC Radio 2 Book Club
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By Emily Howes
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SELECTED FOR THE BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB | WINNER OF THE MSLEXIA NOVEL COMPETITION
1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out.
When the family move to Bath, Thomas Gainsborough finds fame as a portrait artist, while his daughters are thrown into the whirl of polite society. Here, the merits of marriage and codes of behaviour are crystal clear, and secrets much harder to keep. As Peggy goes to greater lengths to protect her sister, she finds herself falling in love, and their precarious situation is soon thrown catastrophically off-course. The discovery of a betrayal forces her to question all she has done for Molly – and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another . . .
Inspired by true events and told with irresistible vibrancy and wit, Emily Howes’ award-winning debut is a captivating and deeply moving novel about art, sisterhood and the price we pay for love.
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Who doesn’t enjoy a leisurely stroll around an art gallery admiring moments and people captured in time throughout the ages? The works of Thomas Gainsborough are of particular note, especially as monetary constraints compelled him to eschew his favourite genre of landscapes for portrait painting. His aesthetic portrayals of his beloved daughters, Peggy and Molly, are simultaneously pleasing and eye-catching, capturing at once their ostensible youthful innocence and his obvious devotion. Using this platform as her background, Emily Howes conjures up a spectacular read combining factual and fictional events surrounding the Gainsborough family. It is insightful, startling, sad and truly masterful in its scope.
It came as a complete surprise to me that Peggy and Molly’s stories are so tragic. Whilst on the one hand they begin by frolicking and scampering around the Suffolk countryside in a customary carefree and childish manner, on the other they have to adapt to a more serious urban lifestyle within the constraints and formalities of high society Bath. There is, however, an onerous and fundamental problem. One of the siblings, the elder, has sporadic and erratic episodes of ill health, unwelcome and embarrassing. The younger sister endeavours to hide these flaws and offer protection, anxious to avoid separation and incarceration in a Bedlamesque environment. With their wings unwillingly clipped, Peggy and Molly inevitably mature, encountering a host of seemingly insurmountable obstacles to conventional living along the way. What will happen when they discover love and infatuation? Having both a noble lineage and an evidently promiscuous father adds to the complexity and the tale’s momentum.
The author drip feeds the plot from the perspectives of Peggy Gainsborough and a tavern girl, Meg, who uncovers the secrets of Peggy and Molly’s mother’s past. Howes considers issues of dependency, control, illegitimacy and societal expectations for women. Above all, she highlights what becomes for the family an existence of performance masking the stigma of a mental health disorder in its midst. This is a remarkable, haunting and definitive indelible narrative.
