52 pages • 1 hour read
Rosamunde PilcherThe Shell Seekers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Ambrose”
During World War II, Penelope realizes almost from the start that joining the Wrens was a mistake. Penelope is assigned to the Royal Naval Gunnery School on Whale Island and is made an Officers’ Steward. On a sunny day in February, Penelope is walking back to the Wrennery from town, and a young soldier named Ambrose Keeling offers her a ride. They talk about their families, and Ambrose gets the impression that Penelope’s parents are wealthy. They begin dating. Ambrose invites Penelope to a play in London, and she quickly offers up her family home on Oakley Street as a place for them to stay. At the house, Penelope shows Ambrose around, and he is impressed with the size of the house and the Bentley that her father owns.
Ambrose and Penelope attend the theater and go to dinner. When they return home, Ambrose and Penelope become intimate. Several months later, Penelope takes leave and returns to Cornwall. Penelope confesses to her mother Sophie that she is pregnant. Sophie warns Penelope not to marry Ambrose if she does not love him, but Penelope assures her that she does. Penelope meets Ambrose’s mother, Dolly Keeling, on the day before the wedding. The meeting does not go well because Dolly is unimpressed with Penelope’s bohemian upbringing. However, Dolly is thrilled to become a grandmother.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Sophie”
Penelope sees Ambrose again for the first time in November when he gets leave and visits Porthkerris. Penelope confesses to her mother later that the visit was miserable, and she realizes that she doesn’t love Ambrose. It is also clear that Lawrence and Sophie don’t like Ambrose, either. However, Penelope feels there’s nothing she can do now that she is married to him. The baby, Nancy, is born a short time later. Nancy doesn’t look like Penelope or Ambrose, but she is a happy child, and Doris adores her, becoming something of a surrogate mother. About this time, Doris receives notice that her husband has died in the war. Sophie and Lawrence tell Doris that she and her boys are welcome to stay at Carn Cottage for as long as they want.
The bombings begin in London, and the Sterns worry about their friends and lodgers. Lawrence wants to bring his lodgers Elizabeth and Peter to Porthkerris, but there is no room. Sophie, however, is unhappy being stuck in Porthkerris, and Lawrence suggests that she travel to London to visit their friends and check on the house on Oakley Street. Sophie is excited about the trip. The night before she leaves, Sophie and Penelope share a happy conversation. Lawrence speaks to Sophie shortly after she arrives in London and learns that she is going to dinner with Peter and Elizabeth at the home of their friends, the Dickinses. The next day, Lawrence and Penelope hear about a bombing raid in London and cannot get through to the house on Oakley Street. They finally get a call late in the afternoon and learn that Sophie, Peter, and Elizabeth were all killed while at the Dickinses.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Roy Brookner”
Noel doesn’t like hard work, but he works all weekend clearing out Penelope’s loft, inspired by the possibility of finding Lawrence Stern’s sketches. On Sunday, Nancy comes for lunch. Penelope asks Nancy if she will go to Porthkerris with her, stressing that they would see Doris, who practically raised Nancy as a toddler. Nancy refuses, balking at the idea of leaving her children behind and staying in Doris’s small house. Noel and Nancy bicker all through lunch. The only time they get along is when they pressure Penelope to sell her father’s paintings. Noel says he could use the money to begin his commodities business and points out that Nancy needs the money as well. Penelope asks them to leave. When Noel and Nancy are gone, Penelope goes into her bedroom and retrieves a packet of sketches she hid decades ago in the back of her wardrobe. Penelope invites Roy Brookner, an art assessor from Boothby’s, to her home and shows him the panels, explaining that they are unfinished because arthritis made it too difficult for Lawrence to work. She wants to sell them, and Roy tells her that the American who bought The Water Carriers might be interested. Penelope also shows him The Shell Seekers but makes it clear that she doesn’t want to sell it. Finally, she shows him the sketches. Because they depict some of Lawrence’s most well-known works, including The Water Carriers and The Shell Seekers, Roy tells her that they could potentially sell for 5,000 pounds apiece. (There are 14 altogether.)
Penelope tells Roy how she stayed in a loveless marriage for the sake of her children. She relates that Ambrose got a job working at his father’s publishing company, but all his money went to a gambling habit. Eventually, Ambrose fell in love with a secretary and divorced Penelope in order to marry this woman, then died shortly after Nancy got married. Penelope says she found the sketches in her father’s art studio at the house on Oakley Street and hid them because she was afraid that Ambrose would sell them to pay for his gambling debts. Meanwhile, Antonia learns that Danus wants to open a gardening business but that he has to save up the capital to buy some land. Antonia asks if his father would help, but Danus insists he wants to do it on his own. Penelope watches Antonia and Danus together over the next few weeks and recognizes that they are falling in love. Penelope dreams often of Porthkerris and feels a pressing need to visit. She also decides that she no longer needs The Shell Seekers to comfort her.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
The philosophical similarities between Ambrose Keeling and Noel are obvious from the moment that Pilcher first introduces the character of Ambrose. In the war years, he is depicted as winning Penelope’s affections with his youth and good looks. However, if she had noticed how stories of her family’s wealth excited Ambrose more than her own beauty, she might have run in the other direction. Ambrose is clearly more interested in Penelope for the money he thinks she has and is unaware that most of Lawrence’s wealth is locked up in inherited real estate. However, Penelope is enamored of Ambrose as her first love, and her inexperience leads to a compromising situation and a marriage that turns sour from its very first moments.
If Noel is just like Ambrose, then Nancy is a younger version of Dolly Keeling, her paternal grandmother. Dolly has the same low opinion of the young Penelope that Nancy later holds of her mother. Nancy’s lack of regard is further exemplified when her poor behavior is a match for Noel’s during their lunch date with their mother. The two siblings’ habits of bickering with each other and grasping at ways to seize Penelope’s wealth clearly demonstrate an utter lack of regard for the more intangible values of loyalty, love, and mutual respect upon which solid family relationships are based. Despite her children’s heavy-handed attempts at manipulation, however, Penelope reaches out independently to the broker from Boothby’s, taking great care not to let her children know her intentions. Combined with the revelation that she does indeed possess some of Lawrence’s sketches, it is clear that Penelope is not quite as clueless or inexperienced with the art world as her children would like to believe. On the contrary, she has hidden the sketches for years because she knew that Ambrose (just like her children today) would sell them the first chance he got.
Penelope’s description of her marriage to Ambrose clearly demonstrates that the relationship was an unhappy one from the beginning, and that Penelope’s unwise decision to marry earns her a husband with a gambling problem and a mother-in-law who openly expresses her dislike for Penelope and infects Penelope’s own children with that same dislike. At the same time, Penelope sacrifices much of her inherited wealth in order to raise her children well, giving up her parents’ beloved cottage in Porthkerris in order to educate and provide for her children. Penelope clearly sacrifices her own happiness and security for her children’s sake, and it is equally obvious that once grown, at least two of her children do not appreciate those sacrifices. This dynamic touches upon the theme of the Strains and Benefits of Parent-Child Relationships.
Just as she asked Olivia and Noel in the previous section, Penelope now asks Nancy to accompany her on a trip to Porthkerris, and the repetition of this particular request emphasizes how deeply important such a trip is to Penelope. Coupled with her recent health scare, such a request implies her need to revisit and close past chapters of her life, and any son or daughter sensitive to her needs would be able to intuit the true reasons behind such a nostalgic visit. However, in a further illustration of Nancy’s inherent selfishness, she refuses, balking at the idea of staying in Doris’s tiny house and accusing her mother of refusing to include Nancy’s children in the invitation. Taken together with resentments that Nancy harbors for Olivia’s decision not to invite her to Ibiza years ago, it is clear that Nancy always demands that things happen on her terms, and her terms alone. As always, her primary focus is on appearances—the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” of any given situation—and this dynamic shows that Nancy’s focus is on herself and no one else.
Within the latest flashback to Penelope’s earlier years, Sophie’s death is the first that illuminates the theme of Experiences of Great Love and Great Loss. Penelope’s primary loving relationships are those she has with her parents, particularly with her mother. Sophie is a young mother, and Penelope often comments on how they are more like sisters than mother and daughter. When Sophie dies, Penelope loses one of the most important people in her life: not just her mother, but her closest friend. This loss is profound for Penelope because it comes at a time when she herself is a new mother and needs her own mother’s wisdom. To compound the difficulties of new motherhood, she must also contend with the tumultuous years of World War II, a time when sacrifice and change overwhelmed everyone. However, Lawrence’s reaction to Sophie’s death has the most profound effect on Penelope, because he suddenly loses his youthful nature and becomes the old man he really is. Penelope finds herself watching her father grow frail right in front of her, a reality that forces her to face the fact that she might soon lose him as well.
