The Dower House

Such a gentle and evocative book.Lovers of times past will adore this book.Molly is the daughter of a second son of an impoverished,aristocratic Anglo-Irish family-a family,which in her fathers words lost all of its money,importance and place in the scheme of things after W.W.1. I was as enchanted-as indeed Molly still is,by the sheer beauty of the main manor house,Fromore,now owned by her fathers elder brother,and of the Dower House,Fern Hill,originally the place where widows of the owners of the estate,moved to upon the death of their husbands.The gardens,rather run-down now,and the furnishings of the houses are old,solid and in impeccably good taste-something that new money can't buy,but the ability to maintain these properties is becoming more and more difficult as death duties amd other taxes eat away at the rather meagre incomes of the present owners.This a gently sad book-a story of a particular breed of people who are fighting,unsucessfully to stem the tide and realise the fact that they are the last of their line who will be able to keep up the appearances of wealth and gentility .

I love reading novels; I try to read the very best ones. There isn't room here to define "best" as I understand it, but often I must read works that are one to two hundred years old before I feel certain that the literary fiction in my lap rates with "the best." Fine, latter-day works like Walker Percy's The Moviegoer or (very recently) David Long's The Falling Boy seemed thin on the ground, to say the least. So imagine my surprise, a few years ago, upon reading a novel that made me wonder about that axiom offered up by the late Irish novelist Frank O'Connor -- that the secret of writing novels died with Jane Austen and Turgenev. The novel that turned my head was The Dower House by one Annabel Davis-Goff. I read it, then returned to the beginning and read it again. Several weeks later, I read it for a third time. Not being an academic, this is something I just don't ordinarily do. The Dower House is, in my opinion, the best traditional novel written during the past 40 years. Moreover, I'd be hard pressed to think of a single novel I've read that I've found so enjoyable, so utterly consuming -- OK, one not written by Austen, James, or Wharton (fairly select company). If The Dower House were nothing but a coming-of-age novel, it could hold up its head with anything written since the time of Stendahl and Dickens. But the book offers much more, touching as it does on some of the more important (and distressing) social issues of our time. (Many readers from the American South will feel right at home reading of the plight of the Anglo-Irish at mid-century.) And the prose is delicious: every work fits, every paragraph gives pleasure. As for the young heroine, Molly Hassard, one will read a great many novels before finding a character as likeable and credible as Molly. So many readers would enjoy this book, and it seems downright unjust that so few people seem to have heard of it.

A full and rich story that held my interest from the very first line. Speaks of the changes that the Protestant Anglo-Irish began to face after the War without being demeaning - of either those Anglo-Irish or the Irish Catholics. The characters are charming and humorous, even when they are not suppose to be perfect. Davis-Goff's writing style is what makes this story so thoroughly enjoyable.

In the first decade following World War II, Molly Hasard grows up in Ireland as a second class citizen in spite of being a member of the aristocracy because her father is not the oldest son. Worse yet to Molly is that her parents die when she is young. She moves into her Uncle's DOWER HOUSE where generations of Hasard widows have been conveniently discarded even as her cousin Sophie lives in the opulent manor. As Molly grows up, she realizes that the DOWER HOUSE is an expensive albatross draining the wealth of her uncle. She flees to London to start life anew in a place where life is radically different. Molly must find a balance between her past and her present if she plans to have a harmonious future. THE DOWER HOUSE is an intelligent coming of age tale that astutely uses contrast to depict the changing world of the 1950's. Annabel Davis-Goff compares Sophie to Molly, Molly in Ireland vs Molly in London, and the fading aristocracy with the growing middle class in a profound but well written page turner. Annabel Davis-Goff scribes a triumphant novel that reader who enjoy a sophisticated, very profound piece of authentic feeling fiction, will consume in one bite. Harriet Klausner