@Choppingonions
bloodyforeland I do see what you mean. But isn't a lot of that preparation by the author for the reconciliation between Jane's parents? I agree she shouldn't have to come to these insights (and this is briefly acknowledged in a phrase about an agony no child should have to suffer) but isn't it just part of Jane realising her parents' back story and seeing how it could work again for them? She's able to see her parents' faults, even that her mother suffers from learned helplessness (or lacks the slightest bit of backbone) and her father is at his spoilt worst with his sister. She just loves them anyway aka the parent trap, I thought. If there was a different way to get that information into the story (about her father's love of her mother) I expect the author would have taken it but there wasn't much leeway in how the novel was structured.
Did anyone else love the character of Aunt Becky in the tangled web? So delightfully narcissistic.
Actually, I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right, Andrew Stuart is at his least likeable in the company of insufferable Aunt Irene. There’s that bit where Irene shows up and presides over the dinner for his visiting friend and AS passes his plate for more of her pie and says, with an air of surprise, ‘Eating is not such bad fun after all’, in front of an eleven year old who’s been slaving over a hot stove for him all summer!
(And was poor Lilian Morrow eating her heart out for him all along?)
I think LMM is trying to write a situation that would be incredibly difficult, messy, painful and potentially disappointing in real life — child is brought up in an psychologically abusive household with a cowed, dressed-up, ‘poor little rich girl’ mother and thinking her estranged father is dead, then is sent to stay with him, a total stranger, a thousand miles away, a man much poorer than her own ‘home’, whom she has every reason to resent.
I think LMM works very hard to make this as sunny a narrative as possible by soft-pedalling the dark stuff (Jane never seems to resent her mother’s spinelessness even though it’s allowed her to be brought up in an awful situation and she adores her father from the moment she sets eyes on him, regards his humble circumstances as opportunities to cook and clean and weed, as she’s always wanted, and also Robin has kept her looks ten years on, so doesn’t disappoint the man who regarded her as Helen of Troy and Titania when they’re reunited — the end would read very differently if Robin had become haggard from unhappiness and Andrew a balding tubby middle-aged man!)
Maybe that’s part of the issue — LMM can’t resist not just depicting it all from a child’s POV, she wants to include the adult romance, despite the fact that children don’t consider their parents in this light. So you have Jane utterly invested in her mother’s beauty, unembarrassed by her father reading out his love letters to her mother (because she agrees her mother is the most beautiful woman in Canada!) and unfazed when her father says at the end something like ‘Look at her, Jane! Look at my little golden love!’ When most children of her age might be mortified at their parents behaving like newlyweds.
And everything is conveniently blamed on the evil granny, rather than on Robin’s total wetness and Andrew not having the commonsense to realise that sending a letter to the household of a MIL who hates you to try to get your wife and child back is unlikely to get the desired result.