Daughter of Jerusalem

by Sara Maitland

After trying for five years to conceive a child, Elizabeth and Ian feel some psychological barrier is preventing their parenthood and reexamine their marriage.

Genres: Fiction

239 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1978

About the author

Sara Maitland is a British writer and academic. An accomplished novelist, she is also known for her short stories. Her work has a magic realist tendency. Maitland is regarded as one of those at the vanguard of the 1970s feminist movement, and is often described as a feminist writer. She is a Roman Catholic, and religion is another theme in much of her work.

Reviews

[Daria Samusenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel so sorry for all women who need to face all that pressure from the society. That our only chore in life is to give birth and if we don't we're not real women.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

SUMMARY - A time capsule to late 1970s England, which most successfully tackles difficult themes of infertility and its strain on relationships more at the level of ideas than at the level of plausible characterisation.

My main impression from Maitland's first novel (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award in 1979) was its time capsule quality. Here in the late 1970s we have expectant mothers drinking and smoking, others drink-driving, and the patriarchy dominant. Gay men marry women for love, for family, and to escape shame and psychiatric breakdown. Alongside the old order, though, are the shoots of the new - alliances between the Gay Liberation Front and feminist sisterhoods who debate the possibilities of communal living, and take an equivocal stand on the fortunes of the left.

In 1978 when this book was written, my parents entered 12 months where they both lost their fathers, and miscarried, before a holiday in Wales to bring everyone together. I have always wondered at the trauma that Mum and Dad and my grandmothers must have felt, in this 12-24 months before I was born in 1980. Fiction allows us to imagine our own responses to difficult situations. Maitland's book gives us plenty of tears, rows and apologies. The self-doubting brittleness and denial felt believeable. There are few all-out breakdowns, but plenty of moments when the ability to cope hangs in the balance. I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose a baby, or not be present at a dying parent's bedside. The sedimented layers of merciful forgetfulness would be my only hope. This book shows us the acute pain that jolts in harsh moments but then subsides into tenderness and novelty.

Liz and Ian, our two main characters struggling to conceive, never stand out from the page, but their ideas and actions stand almost diembodied as thought problems. I found the cast of plainly-named English women a little hard to remember. We have the obligatory Jane, plus Alice, Nancy, Mary-Ann and others who now take the form of extras in my memory, and all supply a problem of some sort of Liz, rather than take on much identity of their own. On reflection it is almost like Maitland uses Liz's friends as stimuli in a lab experiment, where their pity, hectoring or overweening support are fed into Liz's caged thoughts, and as complicit white-coated observers we watch to see how Liz will react.

I didn't find the heavy-handedly patronising doctor hugely believeable - and why on earth does signed-up feminist Liz take him even remotely seriously? From my own solipsistic interests I found the marriage of 'recovering' gay man Ian to Liz especially interesting, but I couldn't quite grasp the motives on either side, and how far this was a marriage of convenience, of love, of both, and how it all sat with Ian's continued circle of gay friends. Again it didn't quite seem to add up. However, it wasn't necessarily the point of a book that focuses on woman's socially- and self-imposed expectations of motherhood. On the latter, the ideas delivered, but the characters never really lived enough to become real for me. If they had, this would have been a much rawer and tougher read.

The 'Jerusalem' in the title relates to the Biblical insertions, where Maitland draws parallels to women in the Old and New Testaments who have similar issues of childbirth and marriage. A better-versed understanding of these stories could enrich a reading of Daughters of Jerusalem, and I quite liked the light of timelessness they cast with their millennia-long shadows onto late 1970s London. Altogether I didn't find this book fully satisfying at a human level. I would neverthelss certainly still recommend to anyone who wants to time-travel to the 1970s, or alternatively take a more ideas-focused view on the issues surrounding infertility, biological determinism and choice in family planning.