Customer Reviews

The SQUIRE.

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It's hard to believe this wonderful novel (by the author of the "children's" classic National Velvet) hasn't been rediscovered and reprinted.

The Squire is a sensual yet strikingly unsentimental novel about maternity and mortality. It's not heavy on plot; it tells of a 44-year-old mother of four awaiting the birth of her fifth child. Her husband is travelling in India for three months, so that she is "the squire" of the manor in his absence. As the midwife arrives to guide her through another birth, the squire meditates about life and death in relation to her approaching labor, her distant youthful adventures in Paris, her friend Caroline's current love affairs (which the squire views almost anthropologically, so little can she relate to them now), her children's anxieties, and her problems with servants.

Several elements of The Squire make it one of my favorite discoveries and may warrant further attention. The squire is never given a name--reinforcing the novel's concerns with domestic life and a mother's relations to her children (in the way that mothers are, of course, always nameless to their small children). Bagnold plays with gender assumptions, not only in the squire's masculine title and her position as head of house, but in the squire's references to having become more "male" in her unsentimentality toward men (the fact that her absent husband is barely mentioned during the novel may support this assessment). Perhaps most interesting of all are the reactions of other women in the house to the squire's impending labor: a prudish cook resigns in disgust, offended by the mere thought of childbirth; the new cook gets drunk and spends the night with a man in her room as the labor approaches; the children's nurse yearns for the the day when a new baby will be given into her care; Caroline feigns interest in the baby and is distressed by the squire's breastfeeding; and the midwife (one of the most fascinating characters) is single-mindedly intent on protecting the squire from stress and distraction so that her milk will flow evenly and her bond with the child will be undisturbed.

Some readers were shocked by Bagnold's descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding when the novel was published in 1938. Bagnold worked on the novel over the course of 15 years and through four of her own pregnancies. She believed no one had ever effectively recorded the emotional experiences of birth and maternity, and she set out to accomplish that with The Squire.

More than anything else, however, it is Bagnold's prose that makes this novel extraordinary. Following are a couple of teasers. The first is a description of two of the squire's children:

"Every development and conclusion in Boniface was unheralded. He would not speak, he would not warn. Only now and then, to the squire, his face would light up and his awkward magnificent words would totter out, pompous, glittering, antique and biblical, past his unsmiling lips and beneath his intent, fixed eyes. Henry gay and crisp, lived beside Boniface as on the side of a volcano; ready to dodge and flee when danger rumbled, knowing that under the calm and greening slopes God and the devil lived within, shrugging his creamy shoulders, grinning when he could, but deeply, profoundly respectful, as we are all respectful, towards singleness of purpose, silence, and absence of explanation." (91)

The second passage describes the anticipation of the children's nurse for the new birth:

"Nurse's happy excitement was flying in her face. All her dreams as a young girl of sixteen, all the scrubbing and washing and running to orders that she had done as a nurserymaid, all the years spent in picking up scraps of knowledge, of working first here and then there, minding the older children, and later on the younger, all had been directed on such a crisis as this. Birth, and the newborn, and her own `sole charge.' The elder children stood back a pace, pale hedges in a garden, while she dived like a gardener into the mould to tend the new plant." (125-126)

This is a rich, profound work that's ripe for rediscovery.

[...]

Enid Bagnold's lyrical and witty prose style creates a luminous portrayal of motherhood from the privileged perspective of "the squire", an upper class English mother in the 1930s, that nevertheless speaks to women across time. She captures the essence of a woman at the end of a wanted and enjoyed pregnancy, preparing for what she knows will be the pain of labor, and the challenge of a new baby, with deep inner resources (as well as the kind of physical help that was and is unavailable to most women). Her reflections on the different types of women and the different stages in a woman's life are thought-provoking. Her writing flows with such elegance that this is a book that you can read in one sitting. Her writing brings you into her world so completely you do not want to break the spell by putting the book down.