Mental illness has a way of taking up all of the space that a family can hold.

Molly (Mary) and Peggy (Margaret) Gainsborough are the much-painted daughters of artist Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Born in 1750 and 1751 respectively, the two sisters grow up together and seem very close.

But Molly, the elder daughter, has problems. She is prone to sleep-walking. She blanks out, forgetting where she is, and what she is in the middle of. She frequently says things that make no sense. And every so often, she loses it completely, screaming and struggling with the very people who love her the most and are trying to help.

Mental illness has a way of taking up all of the space that a family can hold. And when you have a situation with an absent parent (a father who is a famous painter with many demands on his time), and another parent who simply cannot cope (a mother who has a tendency to become self-indulgently hysterical) then something has to give. That something is Peggy, the younger daughter, who is what we would now call a “parentified child.” This is the child who has no childhood. The child who suffers from an overwhelming sense of duty. The child who picks up the burdens that the adults should be carrying.

And so Peggy looks after her elder sister, covering up for all her slips, so that the family will not be disgraced by the “mad” daughter who could bring disaster on her family at a  time when her father is building his career, which means inducing the wealthy and aristocratic to come to his home for their paintings.

Peggy does such a good job of protecting her sister that her parents really don’t see what is going on. They believe that it is Peggy who is causing all the chaos, while Molly, much quieter than her spirited younger sister, is seen as the epitome of the perfect young lady. Everything appears to be under control (almost) when both sisters fall in love, and long buried emotions and resentments erupt, threatening scandal.

Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751)

Another thread of the story takes place a generation earlier in 1727, when a 20-year-old barmaid takes a fancy to Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751) who is the son and heir of George II and the father of George III. Their coupling leads to the usual typical situation. But Peg the barmaid, is not your usual type of woman, and through sheer grit and determination she makes sure that her illegitimate daughter Margaret has £200 a year to live on for the rest of her life. This was an enormous sum of money in the 1700s, and was the only thing that kept the Gainsborough family afloat thirty years later.

For (of course) both story lines are connected. Molly and Peggy’s mother was called Margaret Burr before her marriage. But it seems that she may have been related to the Duke of Beaufort (according to Wikipedia.) In this novel, however, Emily Howes posits that her father ~ who would have been Molly and Peggy’s grandfather ~ was actually Frederick, Prince of Wales. And just as Frederick’s eldest son and heir George III (1738-1820) suffered from Porphyria, a condition that led to his being declared unfit to govern in 1810, so poor Molly Gainsborough suffered from it also. 

The great strength of this novel is in the way the author allowed time for all the various emotions to unspool on the page. A truly wonderful take on the eighteenth century as well as the anguish that mental illness can cause a family. Five stars.

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