The Summer Before the War

Today, we met to chat about The Summer Before the War. I tried to do this without spoilers and failed miserably. You’ve been warned.

I admit, this book was very much on my mind last weekend, when my 23-year-old daughter “took to her bed.” I shared with the ladies this morning that Katie got engaged two weeks ago, and Louis, her fiancé, left for Houston on Sunday morning. Then Katie went to bed. Just like that. Quite literally, he left, she went up to her room, crawled into bed, and stayed there. To be fair, it has been a whirlwind couple of weeks. But she had all kinds of things she needed to do. We also had all sorts of things we needed to do. We kept trucking along. She did not. About four o’clock that afternoon, the rest of us (who have maintained our sanity) were in the kitchen, and somebody asked, “Where’s Katie? What’s her deal?”

Somberly, I replied, “She’s taken to her bed. It’s like an Edwardian novel.”

This brings us to Agatha. We all wondered at her reality. This is what women could do in that time period. They could just put their life on pause and have a “nervous breakdown.” That’s probably not the right term. A woman in our group provided the translation of the German way of phrasing this phenomenon. I liked it so much: she lost all of her air.

What strikes me is that this is a thing we hear about in women of a time gone by. Everybody lets them do it. Of course Agatha has taken to her room. She’s just doing that thing that women do.

Have you ever reached a point where you feel like so many things have just hit you all at once, and you’ve put all this emotional and physical energy into all the moving pieces? And then either something crashes or just everything finally solves, and you’re still just wiped out.

What I think is interesting is they let her. They were concerned about her, but she just took to her bed, or to her chambers, for a significant period of time. In what universe would anybody do that now? I have to believe that maybe there’s some benefit to this practice. We should consider reinstating it.

I also believe that she could stop abruptly, but it was disconcerting to so many people because prior to this incident, she’d never stopped—she was the one always noticing, always planning, always rescuing, always intervening. Her emotional and physical collapse is notable because she’s the glue of this community.

Set in the small, coastal English town of Rye in 1914, the story follows Hugh Grange, a medical student, and his cousin Daniel, who are visiting with their Aunt Agatha and her husband John, a diplomat. Aunt Agatha has just pushed her influence and risked her reputation in society by hiring a young woman, Beatrice, to replace the Latin master in the local school. What begins as an idyllic summer soon gives way to the realities of war, and that reality turns out to be so much more than the brief, manageable war that the village anticipated.

What was interesting to me is that the reader initially thinks Beatrice is the main character, but in many ways, it is actually the middle-aged woman who receives her. Agatha is a strong woman who understands the conventions of the society in which she lives—she sees the way things are, and she has some well-formed ideas about the way things should be. She lives within the confines of her society, but she also tries mightily to affect change from within.

The reader recognizes her wisdom, the fruit of the experience of being the generation before Beatrice and Hugh. The book is richer because we benefit from the voices of both Beatrice and Agatha. Beatrice recognizes that Agatha is an ally almost right from the beginning.

Beatrice is bright and thoughtful. She’s not as outwardly progressive as other female characters, but she is forward-thinking. She’s an unmarried, independent woman who wants to teach Latin in a world of academia that has always been mostly men. And so she has to confront all the prejudices of that time.

Agatha’s gift is that she works with what she has. She is astute about the way society works, and she works through relationships and influence rather than rejecting the social order outright. She notices bright children in the working class and works to procure an education for them that will bring them to a better future. She is able to use her influence to secure a teaching position for Beatrice. She skillfully uses privilege, hospitality, education, and reputation to make the village a truly better place. And she almost always recognizes the ways social rules can sometimes be quietly bent before they can be publicly changed. But when she misses, she tragically misses. Her ability to read the large rooms in the community makes what she fails to see in her family rooms at home even more striking.

Agatha’s flaw is not that she doesn’t love her nephew Daniel (who might actually be her son); it is that she loves him so much that she believes her love and familiarity give her the clearest possible understanding of him. Her inability to see what everybody close to her and to Daniel is trying to tell her (in very genteel language) about the real threat before Daniel—and how she completely messes it up because she thinks she knows better—is just so interesting to me. This woman, who manages so many other parts of this Edwardian society ever so deftly, fumbles very badly when the stakes are high.

We talked at length about her gifted spiritual motherhood, but we also discussed this angle. The people closest to Agatha warned her about some serious issues for Daniel. And despite her obvious intelligence and perception in almost every other situation, she failed to understand. Good mothers surely don’t want to be blinded to difficult realities of our children, and so, perhaps, we tell ourselves that we see something others can see so clearly. We think that we’re the ones who really understand, and everybody around us doesn’t know him as well as we know him.

We have to ask ourselves if intimate knowledge sometimes helps us understand a person more truthfully, and other times it gives us an elaborate vocabulary for explaining away what everyone else can see.

The author’s treatment of Daniel’s and Craigmore’s homesexual relationship was Edwardian, as it should be. She did not simply impose contemporary speech upon an Edwardian household. Instead, the truth about them was told through hints, warnings, euphemism, legal danger, and silence.

It’s easy to forget in our society, where we live the opposite of genteel treatment of LGBTQ+, but this was something that was unspoken, even between spouses. It would have been helpful if Agatha’s husband John had just come right out, sat her down, and said, “All right, look, this is the situation, and this is what we’re trying to do.” But even he couches it in the language of the age.

The genteel language also happens between men. Hugh begs Daniel to resign and not cast aspersions on his reputation. And then Hugh says he’ll be a character witness to his morals. Daniel says, “Well, that’s very sweet.” And Mr. Tillingham says, “It’s not perjury if he believes it.” Daniel and Tillingham smile at each other like they get each other.

We asked ourselves what it is about the relationship between Agatha and Daniel that causes Agatha to miss such a glaring thing. Further, what does it say about us as mothers with grown sons? One has to pause and ask if there are areas where we are being oblivious.

Agatha’s blindness where Daniel is concerned may be more than an aunt’s affectionate, naive misunderstanding. It may be the defensive blindness of a mother whose entire relationship with her son has depended upon never publicly acknowledging that he is her son and she carried him within her very being. (We explored the hints at this during her conversation, but I don’t want to give those away.)

Agatha’s maternity is hidden in this relationship, but her spiritual motherhood is visible everywhere else. Agatha does not—and cannot—publicly claim maternity in the conventional sense. Yet wherever she goes, she notices vulnerable life and begins arranging the conditions in which it might have better opportunities to flourish. She is certainly a spiritual mother to Hugh and Daniel, but she also takes on that role with the community at large. She’s the one who notices the children who could have a better opportunity at life if they had a better education. And then she’s the one who figures out a way to provide for that. Agatha is adept at receiving people whose ordinary family structures have failed them. She is aware of her influence, and she uses it to better the small world in which she lives. There is a mothering domino effect that Agatha puts in motion. She is attuned to what the vocation of true motherhood really is.

Beatrice is plainly the conventional heroine, but Agatha may be the novel’s true center. Beatrice is also someone who has never been mothered. She needs a mother, and Agatha finds her. Beatrice arrives motherless, professionally vulnerable, and financially constrained. Agatha recognizes her and begins to create room for her. By the end of the book, the reader gets the sense Beatrice is going to be mothered in a very real way by Agatha in the newest season of her life. We can reasonably believe that Agatha will mentor her, and eventually Beatrice will step into that same role in the community.

We talked about fathers at length, too. Here, as in Agatha’s and Daniel’s relationship, being very close to someone does not confer perfect knowledge of who they really are. Beatrice and Celeste are motherless daughters devoted to their fathers. Both must confront the fact that paternal love was weaker, more conventional, more selfish, or more cowardly than they had believed. Especially in Celeste’s case, a father egregiously failed and even wounded his daughter. We discussed the idea (put forth by the publisher) that all the characters place too much trust in father figures. It was suggested that this is a useful metaphor for England as it goes to war.

The book ends perhaps too abruptly to come away with a settled sense of home and a cozy arc of redemption. Agatha’s loss after Daniel’s death cannot be repaired. We can believe, however, that Celeste and her child are within reach of her care. Beatrice and Hugh may also create a new family in which Agatha’s maternal influence continues.

The ending’s hope is generative rather than restorative. We can be reasonably certain that life will still be received, protected, educated, and mothered. That is the legacy of the women of the summer before the war.

Note: Book club posts are never behind a paywall. I appreciate the time and effort that goes into writing good fiction, and I love this small chance to be able to get the word out about books I’ve read.

These essays begin weeks before I post them. In this case, of course, I read the book, and I took copious notes. The novel is quite long, and I’ve only scratched the surface of our book club conversation here. This morning, I met live with members of the Take Up community and we asked questions together. As happens frequently, the questions led us in a direction I may not have intended—someplace I couldn’t have reached alone. I’m happy to go down rabbit trails the Holy Spirit provides! I referred to my copious notes, the transcript, and the chat from that meeting to create this essay. You can access the full video replay of this session in the Take Up & Read membership. It is in the archives along with numerous coaching workshops, group coaching sessions, bible studies, and book chats. Come join us.