SYNOPSIS
Set in the period 1844 to 1927 this book shows a very small window into the lives and loves of three people whose stories are set against the harsh reality of yesterday’s changing world in the development of England and New Zealand.
Faced with economic ruin in Sheffield in 1844, an architect of small consequence, initiates employment for two of his children, causing his elder daughter Edith to question her long term designated “role” as a wife and mother, her reliance upon a male provider, and her inferior status as a woman in society and at law.
For the first time in her life she is provided with a real choice, an opportunity to make her own mark through teaching or life in a domestic environment.
Perhaps she is more fortunate than most. Inadvertently she finds great romance and financial security with a man who revels in her wit and intellect and with whom she has a relationship of equality. With a strong sense of duty and attachment to family members coupled with the upholding of the family name in the face of her cousin Jack’s immorality Edith is depicted as a woman of great strength, and a force for the future.
The second story relates to Edith’s cousin Jack Pemberton, whose background is one of upward mobility. With a grandfather who served as a working class errand boy, and a father in trade, Jack, through his natural charm, ability and changing political opportunities in Victorian times gains credence as the representative for Rotherham and departs for London and Parliament. He is both ambitious and obsessed with an egotistical desire to make a name for himself in politics which overrides every other consideration.
In London he is surrounded by the opportunity of power and money and quickly becomes seduced by a lifestyle to which he cannot gain access. Single minded in his pursuit he sets out to marry knowing full well that marriage is his only way of obtaining the essential ingredients towards power in politics.
In Beatrice he finds a combatant who is more wily in politics, more corrupt and more seductive than he, and although he finds her methods abhorrent he cannot survive without her in politics and well he knows it. Gradually he finds that his success will be limited unless he is prepared to surrender all principles he has to his political masters. Is he prepared to do this? And at what cost is success? What must he surrender to achieve what he wants in life above all else?
Lucy’s story is one of tenacious survival. Niece to Edith and second cousin to Jack, her early life is one of constant caring for her brothers and sister until wooed and wedded. But she marries a man whose restlessness emanates from a passion to succeed in everything he turns his hand to without any measure of consistent ability.
With him she emigrates to New Zealand and faces not only the hardship of travel together with the need to establish a way of survival in a pioneer society, but also the waywardness of Maggie her only sister.
In time an illegitimate child brings disgrace upon the family name and Lucy’s brother Robert Mascall is sent to prison. Both excesses Lucy has to stoically bear.
When her husband abandons his successful business to take up farming as a smallholder just prior to the First World War, she has great foreboding. It is her husband’s lack of understanding of the vicissitudes of farming coupled with the deteriorating economic plight of the commodity market from the end of the First World War to 1927 which eventually seals their fate.
Forming the backdrop to their stories and affecting the characters are the changing economic, social and political differences between England and New Zealand during the period, the ability and aptitude of the individuals to resolve these problems including coping with poverty, the significant cultural differences between the two countries, with a more repressive stance in New Zealand, coupled with the importance of morality in politics.