It’s a kind of praise—and I don’t think backhanded or damningly faint—to say that while I did not particularly enjoy reading “Her Mother’s Daughter,” I was acutely aware while reading that only William Trevor could have (or would have) written it. The protagonist is a girl named Helena, who lives with her mother in a southwest suburb of London. Helena’s father died when she was eight (on her birthday, we are informed later in the story), leaving Helena to grow up in her mother’s strange realm. Helena’s mother is an unpleasant, neglectful and yet simultaneously oppressive figure, a woman who scorns Helena’s attempts at friendship and human connection, who prefers a silent house in which she carries on her husband’s life’s work: writing a book, or volume of books, concerning etymology—a work that as described sounds suspiciously like a kind of intellectual outsider art. Helena is sent to boarding school and eventually escapes the house, gaining employment as a cook in the canteen of a paper manufacturer. Her mother ultimately dies of starvation, having just completed her and her dead husbands’ opus, and Helena has the house cleaned and sold, telling the estate agent to throw away the manuscript.
It’s difficult to imagine what would compel someone to write a story like this. Nothing much happens, and what does happen is both bleak and dull. Helena’s mother is a kind of monster, but not an especially interesting one, a monster of reclusive silence and withheld or absent feeling. Helena herself is not very interesting or intelligent, and the story, via her downbeat observation of her dreary and deprived existence does not offer much in the way of insight into family and the varieties of abuse that it can present. The most interesting element in the story is the book co-authored by Helena’s parents, or perhaps rather the history of this project, but Helena’s mother has assiduously blocked any information about her past from her daughter and thereby, the reader. One could imagine this story, or a story with the same premise, coming alive in the hands of a Borgesian fabulist, but William Trevor is, of course, almost the spiritual and aesthetic opposite of a Borgesian fabulist.
So again: why? As is sometimes the case with Trevor’s work, you feel the narrative compulsion at work in the crafting of this realm and its boundaries, in the slow and suffocating narrative encroachment of a normal girl’s life and possibilities. Trevor mercifully allows Helena to escape at fifteen, or perhaps as we learn, not so mercifully—Helena has been sufficiently damaged by her childhood that she knows at something like twenty years of age that “she would never marry; as long as she lived she would be afraid to bring a child into the world…”
I’ve written before in this project about how Trevor’s work sometimes approaches gothic fiction, in terms of the kind of torturous isolation, especially in terms of duration. Trevor’s characters are often hidden away—by external forces or their own natures—for decades, lifetimes. This is not the stuff of realist fiction but of fairy tales, ensorcelled maidens who sleep for centuries. Trevor, of course, is not interested in castles or towers or savior princes, but he is as seemingly compelled by the idea of fantastical enclosure as the Brothers Grimm. Story after story in the Collected is powered by the meticulous creation of a realm that constricts and deforms—signally, the friendly next door neighbor Mrs. Archingford whom Helena was forbidden to talk to, enters the house after the death of Helena’s mother with a kind of spellbound fascination, saying, “D’you know, I’ve never in all my days been inside this house? Not that I expected to, I mean, why should I? But really it’s fascinating to see it.” Poor Helena makes it bodily out of that suburban house of muted horrors, but, as the title suggests, she will never really escape.
