One of my favorite books of the year is Joyce Cary’s out-of-print novel, The Moonlight (1946).
This mordant novel chronicles the lives of three women in a dysfunctional family, two elderly sisters and their niece, who live in their family’s historic home in the country. It is also a “loam-and-love-child” novel (think Thomas Hardy’s pastoral novels and the lyrical tales of country passion by Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith), with a trace of histrionic Tennessee Williams.
Cary is nostalgic for Victorian manners but concentrates on the changes in the 20th century. He describes the psychological problems of the conflicting times: the destructive envy, the dangers of repression, and the clash of Victorian morals with 20th-century mores.
The family issues are complicated by the issue of sex, or the lack thereof. The two sisters, Rose Venn and Ella Venn, born in the Victorian age, are now in their seventies. Rose is still a stuffy, gung-ho Victorian, but Ella wants to break the rules and embrace modernity. She is determined to save their niece, Amanda, from spinsterdom and childlessness. (There is a twist: Ella’s life is not as it seems.)
Rose is the oldest sister. She has had no sex life. When she was in her twenties, she sacrificed herself to keep house for their widowed father: she broke off her engagement to an older man she loved to do so. Later Rose martyred herself again by urging her younger sister, Bessie, to marry her ex-fiancé, whom, by the way, Bessie hated. Now Rose is an imperious invalid who still rules the household from her sickbed.
The sister who gets on our nerves, Ella, emerges as our favorite character. This 74-year-old youngest sister helps take care of Rose, but can leave her in the nurse’s care while she attends to her own affairs without interference. Most of all, she wants to free Amanda from Rose’s moral rigidity and spinsterdom.
Cary’s writing is always a delight. I was hooked from the opening paragraph.
Miss Ella Venn, aged seventy-four, coming downstairs, just before dinner, saw her niece in the arms of a young farmer called Harry Dawbarn, who had just entered the house by way of the garden. The sight gave her such pleasure that she ran back to her room. “Oh, thank God!” she said to herself. She was tearful with joy.
It may not be a classic, but it’s a great read.