I published this review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jean Stafford’s neglected novel, The Catherine Wheel, at Thornfield Hall on July 30, 2022. This is a rerun.

Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel is a sophisticated, if chilly little book, told from the perspectives of two troubled characters.  

Tranquil Katharine Congreve, a middle-aged spinster, believes in “the pleasure principle” but dislikes change. Now she faces a sexual crisis.  In her youth, she was in love with John Shipley, an architect who fell for her bland cousin, Maeve.  Weirdly, John and Maeve invited Katharine to accompany them on their honeymoon, claiming that she had made the match.  (She had not.)

In the present, she is having an affair with John, who wants to divorce Maeve, and insists Katharine must marry him to “save” him.  This salvation is not what Katharine had in mind.

The Shipley children spend summers with Katharine in Maine while Maeve and John go to Europe.  The teenage twins, Honor and Harriet, are excited about having new dresses made and meeting new boys at tea; but 12-year-od Andrew, who is bullied at prep school and friendless in the city, is crestfallen because his local friend Victor has dropped him.  

Victor’s neglect of Andrew seems pathological. Victor is nursing his older brother, Charles, a sailor who has malaria.  Victor does not speak to Andrew when he passes the house.  He refuses to allow Andrew into the house to visit him and Charles.

And so  Andrew lies in a hammock all day, fantasizing about killing Charles. 

In this small town in Maine, everyone meddles in everyone’s business.  People  gossip when Katharine’s lights are on all night, and speculate that she is ill, or that she is up reading Gone with the Wind.  Katharine feigns calm and pretends she has been making a list for a grand outdoor party, which will end with her favorite firework, the Catherine Wheel, named after the martyr St. Catherine of Alexandria.

Needless to say, Katharine is no saint, and it is a difficult summer for her, despite her aristocratic manners and dependence on tradition.  Stafford, who was raised in Colorado and graduated from the University of Colorado, learned the manners not from childhood from her husband, Robert Lowell, who grew up in a wealthy Boston family. 

A brilliant novel!