Melike und Cornelia review:

 

 

 

Margaret Drabble

2002

 

The Seven Sisters

 

à Summary

à Assessment and recommendation

à Extract

à Characters

à The Gap between the Generations

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Summary of the plot of the story

 

“The Seven Sisters” is a novel about a late-middle-aged woman called Candida Wilton.

The story was written by Margeret Drabble in 2001.

Candida arrives in London, alone, divorced, rejected and without much money. But nevertheless she is filled with a strange sense of excitement.

She always thought that her life was boring and nothing ever happened. Now, she wants to seek her fortune and she hopes to start a new life.

Candida begins writing a diary and expects to fill it with the small events with which she pads out her empty life. So Candida is the narrator of her own story and we are the readers of her diary. She joins a Health Club, makes some new girl friends and is feeling her way back into life after an unhappy marriage.

Unexpectedly she inherits a little fortune. With the money she invites her five best friends to join her on a trip abroad – to Tunis, Naples and Pompeii. For a long time she has been dreaming of such a journey and now she has really the chance to make it.

In the second part of the novel, the point of view is shifted and an omniscient narrator takes over to describe the wonderful holiday with the “Seven Sisters”. Candida enjoys the company of the women and for the first time in her life she feels absolutely happy and free.

In the third part, Drabble brings in again another voice: Candida’s daughter Ellen, who explains that Candida is dead. Candida has three daughters but she hasn’t been in touch with any of them.

In the fourth part, Candida’s voice returns to tell that the second narrator was her own invention and that she is still very much alive. But the way Ellen reacts to the would-believe suicide of her moher makes her sad and thoughtful. Therefore, Candida revives their relation and is even invited to Ellen’s wedding in Finland. She confesses that she has made a lot of mistakes in the bringing-up of her three children and is now convinced that she will arrange her future differently from her past.

She is looking forward to what can still happen in her life and finally she realises that one can make anything happen, if only one has the nerve to do it.

 

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Assessment and recommendation

 

“The Seven Sisters” is a very amusing story and easy to read, but nevertheless we never had the impression that the story wasn’t true to life.

Drabble excels more in character development than in telling a story, which in this book is rather thin and can be summed up in a few lines.

What we enjoyed most in “The Seven Sisters” were the descriptions of the “sisters” and Drabble’s droll sense of humour and her cheerful observations throughout the book.

We personnally disliked the trick the author uses in Part Three, where the readers are told that Candida has died. We were shocked at the suddenness of her death. Later we are told that her “death” simply occurs in a story that Candida has made up and written from the point of view of her daughter Ellen.

In our opinion, Drabble is not playing fair with her readers here. It is like saying at the end of a long story, “It was only a dream”. But despite these trifles, Margaret Drabble is a wonderful writer. “The Seven Sisters” is a fascinating book, which we highly recommend to those who like delightful entertainment.

We really enjoyed it page by page. It wasn’t a “must” to read the

book – it was a pleasure!

 

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An extract from the book

 

We have chosen an extract from the beginning of the book.

Candida just begins writing her diary. She describes why she lives in London now. In this extract she looks back on her arrival in this “strange place”. For the first time she lives alone in her own apartment and thinks  about her former neighbours, who are certainly gossiping about her.

It is a typical passage for Candida’s style of writing. She asks herself a lot of unanswered questions and wallows in alternating bouts of self-pity and self-deprecation. She is making grand and absolutely amusing statements. We can see that Candida is as critical of herself as of others.

 

Page 41/42:

 

…I was frightened when I first moved into this flat, alone. It is my own. I bought it, with the handout that Andrew gave me as the price of our divorce. Why did I choose this dark, dirty, menacing area, this street so unlikely any street I have ever inhabited before, even in my imagination? Was it perversity? Was I setting myself a survival test? Was I punishing myself?

I knew I couldn’t stay in Suffolk, although most people expected that I would. They didn’t think I’d have the initiative to clear off so completely. (I don’t think “clear off” is a very ladylike phrase either – maybe I am losing caste by living here?) But I couldn’t face the prospect of hanging around in a country where I might still bump into Andrew and my replacement. His new partner, Anthea Richards, now his bride. However careful I was not to bump into them, I’d still have to hear gossip about them, because Suffolk is a small (or perhaps I mean a thinly populated) country, and people in what was our world did not talk about one another all the time. Andrew’s second marriage has been newsworthy. I’m sure I would have talked about it myself, had I not been one of the parties. (That’s an odd phrase too – “parties”. Odd how writing things down makes all the phrases I take for granted look slightly off-key.)

Nobody expected Andrew to embark on an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. It wasn’t as though she herself was “in statu pupillari”, but the connection nevertheless seemed more than vaguely unprofessional and improper – as though one or the other of them had taken advantage of the very thing that should have kept them apart…

 

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Characters:

 

Candida Wilton:

She is a woman just past her 50s. She has been rejected by her husband for a younger woman, and her children have become estranged from her. She is also a very friendly person but a little worried about making new friends because she is so bad at shaking off old ones.

While planning her trip to Italy she changes part of her personality. She becomes more self-confident and enjoys the feeling of being free. She seems to have turned into somebody else, a less docile person.

 

Andrew Wilton:

He divorced Candida some years ago and has got together with the mother of one of his pupils, which shows that he is a teacher.

In his younger days he was a kind of “everybody’s darling”. Every girl wanted to get him but he chose Candida. He is still a good-looking Englishman in his older days, correct in every way, six feet tall with clear blue eyes. He is very friendly and reliable in his behaviour and he wants everything to be clear.

 

Isobel Wilton:

She is the first-born of the Wiltons and Candida describes her as a self-centred and avaricious young woman. She has been spoilt by her father so that she now thinks that the world is just turning around her and maybe that’s also the reason why she thinks that her father can do nothing wrong and her mother can do nothing right.

 

Marta Wilton:

She is the youngest daughter and now, as her parents have got divorced, as thick as thieves with her stepmother Anthea. Her mother finds her very hysteric because she is exaggerating everything. So she seems to be a very emotional person.

 

Ellen Wilton:

She is the second-born and her mother describes her as the most eccentric but also as the most reasonable of the three daughters. She now lives in a small town in Finland where she can play the violin the whole day. She went away and left everything behind, denied her kith and kin and refused her inheritance.

That may be the reason why her mother thinks that she is just cold and dry … and far away.

 

Anais Al-Sayyab:

Candida knows her from the Virgil class and thinks that she is what people call a “lady”. She is very fashionable and always wears the most extravagant dresses and lush and shameless make-up.

She is very busy and has a large circle of acquaintances. This may be because she works in television. She is one of those typical “darling-saying” humans; the first time Candida was shocked when Anais called her “Darling”. We could say she is a little crazy for her age.

 

Julia Jorden:

She is an old friend from St. Anne’s (school) and also then she was first in everything. If you wanted to know anything about boys, love or sex, you had just to ask her, she got the right answers. She always wanted to be free, and as she was very ambitious, she became independent at an early age. She was only 20 when her first novel was published and when she went to Paris. But maybe her ambition is also the reason for her three divorces and they are maybe the reason for her bitterness and unhappiness in her older days. Or she has outlived her looks, her popularity and her fame, even though she never had the recognition and fame that she coveted. She has simply become a nervous prima donna.

 

Sally Hepburn:

She is a good friend from Suffolk (where Candida lived before she got divorced). At the beginning Candida had some problems getting used to her because Sally is a “never-stop-talker” and most of the time she likes to talk about sex. And as she is fat and noisy, it doesn’t make her very likeable either. And she is a fussy eater: you never know what she likes and what she dislikes. This week she hates meat, the next she can’t get enough of it. Her unnatural and unseemly curiosity about other people isn’t very helpful either, so we could say she is a kind of a troublemaker.

 

Cynthia Barclay:

She is a little Cinderella: from housekeeper to the owner’s wife. She was kicked out of school at 16 and had a dozen jobs until she became housekeeper and married Mr Barclay. Now she is living in a grand and exciting house and has enough money to be a real spendthrift. She carries an air of eccentricity and emphatic propriety with her, but nevertheless she plays life as it comes and learns as she goes.

 

Ida Jerrold:

She is a lady in her mid-eighties but still sharp as a needle. Once she was the evening-class teacher of Candida and the other women, and from time immemorial she has liked to read and write poems. She is like a tough old bird who will never tire and never complain.

 

Valeria:

She plays the tour guide in this story. An extremely tall, noble-looking Italian woman with some Ethiopian blood. She is a lady if ever there was one and immediately accepted as a social equal. In fact everybody falls in love with her. She is an insightful woman: By the time they have reached their first destination, she has correctly identified all others’ characters. Only with Anais she doesn’t know what to do. But she likes her, even if she can’t understand her. 

 
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The gap between the generations – is it really that big?

 

Most people think that there is a big difference between the older and the younger generation. But we think that this story of Margaret Drabble is the best example to show them that it might also be the other way round.

— You don’t understand what we want to say?

Just try for once to compare this old lady in our story with a teenager. Imagine Candida was not 55 years old but maybe…16. Haven’t you ever heard things like: “Oh darling, you’re too young to understand this, you’re still looking for your own personality. It’s OK if you are depressive or if you have no idea what to do with your life.” Well, OK, we don’t all have depressions or whatever, but what we want to say is that no matter which age, every person is in a way helpless when they step onto new territories. For people at an advanced age this helplessness is maybe not as alarming as it is for younger ones, but we don’t think that they just think: “So now I’ll do something new and if it does not go well, …who cares, what happens.” This wouldn’t be normal.

This is the situation Candida finds herself in: She starts a new life but she doesn’t know what will happen to her. She’s just afraid of the future, …just like a sweet16-year old girl.
 

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