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208p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 1903155533
Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan, our Spring 2006
novel, has the same theme as Persephone Book No 41, Hostages
to Fortune, a great Persephone favourite: it too is about
a woman bringing up a family who is left at the end, when
the children are on the verge of adulthood, asking herself
not only what it was all for but what was her own life
for? Yet the questions are asked subtly and readably.
Having shown us how everything is made bearable for Patricia
if her children can be at the centre of her life and, more
important (because she is not a selfish woman) if they
grow up to fulfil her ideals, Joanna Cannan proceeds to
show us her happiness being slowly destroyed. In Princes
in the Land the tragedy of the book is that not only do
none of the three children live up to their mother’s
expectations, she has to watch as each of them takes a
path that is anathema to her. Yet of course, she can do
nothing about it; nor, sensibly, does she try.
Joanna Cannan began writing early, and her first
novel was published when she was 26 (by coincidence,
at exactly the same age as Diana Gardner, our
other March writer, was first published). From
1922 onwards she published a book a year for nearly
forty years – novels; detective novels,
including the very successful Death at The Dog,
which is in print in America; and the first ‘pony’
book (first in the sense that the focus was on
a pony-mad girl rather than a horse or pony),
a genre that her daughters Josephine, Diana and
Christine Pullein-Thompson were to make very much
their own. Princes in the Land is about
an interesting and rarely-discussed theme; it
is also evocative about Oxford.
Joanna Cannan ‘lived enthusiastically’
and wrote novels that were ‘witty, satirical,
even cynical. She presented clashes between idealists
and materialists, with no easy solutions’
writes the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(making Joanna Cannan the twenty-sixth of our
writers to have an entry in that great dictionary);
this is the book of hers with a thematic bite
that Persephone readers will find hard to forget.
'Horse's Head' a 1938-9 screen-printed
linen by Lucienne Day is the fabric used for the Princes
in the Land (1938), a novel in which horses are a leitmotif. |
