Books: When love and marriage are ground to dust

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple was first published in 1943. But don't think that because it's been out of print for so long there is anything quaint or dated about this novel. Just like the other Whipple novels published by Persephone Books, They Were Sisters exerts a menacing force from start to finish. I eavesdropped on the lives of Lucy, Charlotte and Vera, the daughters of a provincial lawyer, compelled to go on but with a sense of simmering dread.

Lucy is 18 when her mother dies. In the 1930s world which these women inhabit, it's assumed that she, the eldest, will abandon her dreams of studying at Oxford to become housekeeper and surrogate mother to her two younger sisters. "Life seemed determined, Lucy sometimes thought, to keep her an onlooker." One of her sisters is beautiful, the other resolutely, stubbornly gullible. The beautiful Vera marries because her husband-to- be is wealthy and "will do". Charlotte marries for love, but is relentlessly ground to dust by her monstrous, bullying husband Geoffrey. Ironically, these are the scenes which made the 1945 film of the novel such a hit, with James Mason stealing the show as the brutish Geoffrey. Geoffrey's treatment of his three children is chillingly sadistic. The punishment he thinks appropriate for his disobedient young son will give dog owners nightmares.

The novel's 1943 readers understood all too well that women had no power to escape from terrible husbands. Whipple offers us two disastrous versions of marriage. In one the wife loves too much, in the other she loves too little. But there's a fierce moral core to the book. What should women do to cope with these burdens? Vera asks Lucy whether it really matters how we live our lives. "It matters to ourselves, of course, but it matters terribly to other people. Moral failure or spiritual failure or whatever you call it, makes such a vicious circle."

The vicious circle continues to turn as Vera and Charlotte become mothers. Lucy, forever the "onlooker", remains childless. Vera compounds her sin of vanity, by neglecting her two daughters. Charlotte doubles the burden for her children by failing to stand up to her husband. It is only at the end, when disaster or tragedy has afflicted virtually every character in the book, that Lucy is given the chance to offer comfort to two of her sisters' children. Dorothy Whipple's ability to "wring the truth out" of her characters, as she put it, allowed her to impose a moral blueprint on her novel, without sacrificing plausibility or readability.

By the time Dorothy Whipple came to write her final novel, Someone at a Distance, published in 1953, the appetite for her subtle, acutely psychologically observed novels had gone. The moral dimension in which her characters lived was dissolving, to be replaced by a new style of story - John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. After all her success, Dorothy Whipple's last novel failed to get a single review. It's satisfying to think that the woman who believed how important it was to live your life well should be enjoying a posthumous triumph. She deserves it.

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