Mothering Sunday

In her nineties, thinking about the nature of writing, Jane comments on how terms like “story-telling” and “fiction”, can have “the implication that you were trading in lies” (148). However, Jane argues, the opposite is true. Literary creation is about uncovering the truth of things—“about being true to the very stuff of life” (149). The nature of that “stuff” is less clear. Reading Jane literally, the “truth” could correlate to objective biographical and historical detail. The truth of Jane’s life, for example, emerges from such facts as that “she was born in 1901” (104), married a philosopher who died 12 years into their marriage, and achieved literary success with All in the Mind, going on to write 19 novels and becoming recognized as both a challenging and “modern writer.” One might also add to this outline some broader historical context—for instance, that “she would live to have seen two world wars and the reigns of four kings and one queen” (110).

However, such “truth” is limited, saying relatively little about who a person really is. Biographical information can apply to a wide variety of people and says nothing about a person’s deeper emotional relation to the world or others. What can distinguish an individual from others is a narrative about personally significant events, like the story Jane tells about Mothering Sunday, or Marlow’s story in Conrad’s Youth. These narratives provide phenomenological descriptions of events and relate them to a person’s agency, defining them as a character. Likewise, involvement in such critical moments, which take a person out of the flow of ordinary life, is what gives them their truth. Mother Sunday suggests that it is the role of good writing to explore these moments.

This is not always easy. For one thing, engaging with or discussing significant events in life can be psychologically difficult. Jane finds it hard to talk about Donald’s death or what she went through in connection with it. Likewise, Mr. Niven does not discuss the loss of his two children in the war, only betraying its effects when he breaks down in tears in front of Jane. As importantly, there is the problem of perception, memory, and narrative. This is seen in Jane’s anecdote about how the cook, Milly, confused the words “orphan” and “orchid” when Jane first met her. As Jane later wonders, “[H]ad she really said it? Or had she herself misheard it? Or invented this little exchange between herself and Milly?” (106). The problem is not just the fallibility of perception or of memory. It is also that, given the centrality of imagination to how we experience the world, the line between “story” and “reality” is itself blurred. This a problem Jane wrestles with in the narrative of her own life; she wonders, “[C]ould she disentangle it, the stuff she’d seen in her mind’s eye, from the actual stuff of her own life” (111).

This ties into why imagination is required in the first place. It acquires an important role in our perception of events and situations precisely because there is so much we cannot directly see or know. For example, Jane has never met Emma and does not know the truth of her relationship with Paul. As she says of the scene in the Swan Hotel when Paul fails to arrive, “[S]he would never know how Emma Hobday herself might have written it” (120). Thus, Jane must imagine it to understand the broader situation. This point is brought home even more forcefully in the case of Ethel. When Jane sees Ethel’s stoic reaction to news of Paul’s death, it throws her initial conception of Ethel as meek and subservient into doubt. As Jane realizes, “[S]he would never know what Ethel did or thought or imagined or felt” (136). Indeterminacy clouds our sense of the other and their narrative. Yet, as Jane’s experiences on Mothering Sunday illustrate, narrativizing the stories of others helps determine our stories and who we are. Thus, it is not only that imagination and “story-telling” will always play a role in our self-constitution; it is that the indeterminate and ineffable must do so also. The writer, in their pursuit of the truth about themself and the world, must paradoxically try to capture this ineffability.