Hardback: 372 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Phoenix 2024
Source: Tywyn Library
First Sentences: First, the canvas. Not one, but many. Great oblongs carried in and out, wrapped carefully in shrouds.
Review Quote: 'Convincing, engaging, transporting' GUARDIAN
My Opinion:
Emily Howes was a new to me author when I recently read her second novel Mrs Dickens and decided I should definitely be reading her debut novel.
'The Painter's Daughters' is centred around Gainsborough's life in Bath, where he moves to enable the family, he hopes to have a decent standard of living. The main protagonists of this story are his two daughters, who though so very different in character are devoted to each other. Their mother's complicated past is also revealed to the reader as a secondary storyline. This helps one to understand the personal difficulties the family faced in private behind the public facade.
An engaging but sad insight into the life of the 18C artist Thomas Gainsborough's daughters. Recommended to readers that enjoy historical fiction, especially if it is based on fact.
Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
A story of love, madness, sisterly devotion, and control, about the two beloved daughters of renowned 1700s English painter Thomas Gainsborough, who struggle to live up to the perfect image the world so admired in their portraits.
Peggy and Molly Gainsborough—the daughters of one of England’s most famous portrait artists of the 1700s and the frequent subject of his work—are best friends. They spy on their father as he paints, rankle their mother as she manages the household, and run barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are from a young age, Molly periodically experiences bouts of mental confusion, even forgetting who she is, and Peggy instinctively knows she must help cover up her sister’s condition.
When the family moves to Bath, it’s not so easy to hide Molly’s slip-ups. There, the sisters are thrown into the whirlwind of polite society, where the codes of behavior are crystal clear. Molly dreams of a normal life but slides deeper and more publicly into her delusions. By now, Peggy knows the shadow of an asylum looms for women like Molly, and she goes to greater lengths to protect her sister’s secret.
But when Peggy unexpectedly falls in love with her father’s friend, the charming composer Johann Fischer, the sisters’ precarious situation is thrown catastrophically off course. Her burgeoning love for Johann sparks the bitterest of betrayals, forcing Peggy to question all she has done for Molly, and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another.
A tense and tender examination of the blurred lines between protection and control, The Painter’s Daughters is a searing portrait of the real girls behind the canvas. Emily Howes’s debut is a stunning exploration of devotion, control, and individuality; it is a love song to sisterhood, to the many hues of life, and to being looked at but never really seen.
Previous Review: Mrs Dickens
Author Profile:
Photo and Bio Courtesy of Amazon
Emily Howes was born in Essex in 1981.
She has worked as a storyteller, theatre maker, writer, performer and director in stage, television and radio. In addition to writing fiction, she holds an MA in Existential Psychotherapy, and works as a psychotherapist in private practice. She lives with her two children, her two cats and her dog in East London.
THE PAINTER'S DAUGHTERS, her debut novel, won the 2021 Mslexia Novel Competition, judged by Hilary Mantel, Jo Unwin and Marianne Tatepo. It is the relatively unknown story of Peggy and Molly Gainsborough, and their mutual struggle with insanity.
Her second novel, MRS DICKENS, is about Catherine, wife of Charles, who had ten children, climbed Vesuvius, and wrote a cookbook.
Photographs and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites: