Dark Hester

Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Dark Hester*, published in 1929 by Anne Douglas Sedgwick, is a psychological novel of family tension set in rural Essex, England, centering on the conflict between Monica Wilmott, a widowed mother in her middle years, and Hester, the modern, self-possessed woman who has married her beloved son Clive. Monica has devoted her life to Clive, sacrificing financially and emotionally through his boyhood, his near-fatal wounding in the First World War, and his slow recovery. Their relationship is unusually close, marked by deep mutual understanding and shared sensibility. When Clive falls in love with and marries Hester Blakeston, a Girton-educated journalist of socialist and feminist sympathies, Monica finds herself unable to accept his choice. From her first sight of Hester, sitting quietly in a Chelsea window in a black cloak lined with red, Monica conceives an instinctive antipathy she struggles throughout the novel to justify, suppress, or disguise. Hester is Clive's opposite in almost every way that matters to Monica. Where Monica values tradition, beauty, sentiment, inherited culture, and the kind of refined femininity embodied by Celia Bowen, the gentle violinist Monica had hoped Clive would marry, Hester is terse, rational, unapologetically modern, and largely indifferent to the social codes Monica holds dear. Hester insists on being married in a Registrar's office rather than a church, furnishes her home in stark modernist style, publishes a work on infant psychology, plans lecture courses on feminism and psychoanalysis, and surrounds herself with friends Monica finds impudent and irreverent. Yet Hester is never presented as simply villainous. She is honest, direct, and deeply loyal to Clive. She does not condescend to Monica openly, and she makes genuine, if clumsy, efforts at accommodation. Unable to bear proximity to a daughter-in-law she cannot love while pretending otherwise, Monica retreats from London to a small cottage in Essex near her old friend Celia Bowen, who has moved there for her health. Monica tells herself and others she is simplifying her life, but she is fleeing. When Hester, perceiving that Clive is unhappy at his mother's isolation, conceives and executes the plan of selling the Chelsea house and buying The Crofts, a property within a mile of Monica's cottage, Monica is trapped. She must now endure daily proximity to the woman she resents while maintaining the performance of a welcoming mother-in-law. Into this strained domestic situation arrives Captain Godfrey Ingpen, a blunt, world-worn former army officer who has spent his life among the warrior tribes of the Afghan frontier, and who settles at the Old Manor Farm nearby as the uncle of Norah Unwin, Celia's companion. Ingpen is damaged, sardonic, and companionable in his disillusionment. He and Monica discover a sympathy rooted in their shared understanding of loss, age, and the habit of endurance. He confides his bitterness; she finds herself speaking aloud thoughts she normally suppresses. Their friendship, watched with unmistakable unease by both Clive and Hester, provides Monica with a form of understanding she has been denied. The novel's crisis turns on Monica's discovery that Captain Ingpen and Hester have a prior connection. She finds his ring in the grass after he helps Robin install the goldfish in the garden fountain, and reads inside it an inscription: his initials, and the initials H.B., with the date 1918. When Ingpen calls to retrieve the ring and invents a story about a great-aunt named Harriet Beaton, Monica investigates and confirms from Norah that no such person exists in the family. The initials match Hester Blakeston. Monica is confronted with the likelihood that Hester and Ingpen were once lovers, that Hester may have concealed this from Clive, and that their simultaneous arrival in the same Essex village is not coincidental. Monica uses this knowledge first as a weapon against Hester, maneuvering her in conversation until Hester's alarmed, furious reaction confirms the connection. Hester walks away rather than submit to further manipulation, leaving Monica to face the consequences of her victory. But the weapon turns in her hand. When she finally confronts Clive with her revelation, he informs her with cold composure that he has always known of Hester's past, that Hester told him everything at the beginning of their courtship, and that he chose her with full knowledge. Monica's hoped-for liberation of her son from a deceiving wife collapses into exposure of her own long-harbored enmity. The novel closes in the wreckage of Monica's position. She has not freed Clive; she has demonstrated to him the depth of her hostility toward the woman he loves. Clive accuses her of cruelty and injustice. He tells her that Hester's apparent coldness toward her was never hatred but bewilderment, and that it was Monica's sustained inability to extend genuine warmth, not any fault of Hester's, that has poisoned their relations from the first. Monica is left with the possibility that much of what she has experienced as Hester's aggression has been, at least in part, her own aggression reflected back. Sedgwick writes with precise psychological sympathy for all her characters without exonerating any of them. Monica is intelligent, self-aware, loving, and genuinely capable of moments of fairness toward Hester, yet repeatedly overthrown by a jealousy she cannot fully acknowledge even to herself. Hester is formidable, sometimes harsh, and in at least one respect not entirely honest, yet her love for Clive and her desire for Monica's acceptance are rendered as real. Clive is caught between two strong women and retreats into exhaustion. Celia watches everything with clear, sad eyes, fond of all parties, unable to save any of them. Ingpen, the ostensible threat, proves in the end to be a man less dangerous than worn out, seeking warmth rather than conquest. The novel's central question is whether a mother's love, however sincere, can become a form of possession indistinguishable from its object, and whether the failure to love a child's chosen partner is ever truly innocent.

By Anne Douglas Sedgwick · First published 1929 · Genre: Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction, Character Study · 16 chapters

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