Everything will be Alright - Tessa Hadley

Book Description

England, just after the Second World War. Two sisters are bringing up their children in an old grey house on an estuary. Lil is a widow; Vera has a husband who keeps his suits in the wardrobe but spends time mysteriously at another house nearby. Vera is a teacher and has unquestioning faith in the illuminations of education and reason; she is exasperated by stories from Lil’s spiritualist séances. In their different ways they have to come to terms with a child’s death and a brother rescued from the mental hospital.
Lil’s daughter Joyce watches them and sees that there is something missing in their lives: men. She doesn’t want to end up like her Aunt Vera, buttoned awkwardly into unflattering clothes, rejected by her husband. Joyce discovers the art room at school: she falls in love with the Impressionists and eventually, with one of her teachers at the art college. In spite of the temptations of the sixties, she is determined to make their marriage and motherhood a success. When Joyce’s daughter Zoe grows up and has a baby of her own, however, she proves impatient with domestic life, and chooses a very different path.
Spanning five decades of extraordinary change in women’s lives, Everything Will Be All Right explores the complicated relationships of one family. The young ones of each generation are sure that they can correct the mistakes of their parents, and live better than they did. The truth, of course, is more opaque. Intricate, insightful and poignant, Everything Will Be All Right is a worthy successor to Tessa Hadley’s acclaimed debut, Accidents in the Home. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way. For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, limited by domesticity. When Zoe has a baby of her own, she wants to combine motherhood with an engagement in the wider world of politics and thought.

Shani's Comment.

I have just finished reading Tessa Hadley's Everythings will be All Right. Oh I do wish it would have been.

Even though there were sentences and expressions within, which I found to be very insightful, I found the whole experience of reading the book a terrible chore.

It basically was the life history of three generations of women, seen through their eyes. Their life's were full of self-inflicted grief, and it really was an account of how they got themselves into scrapes and out again, mostly involving men, and a baby thrown in for good measure (not to mention the death from meningitus).

It isn't a book I would recommend, I only finished it because I set myself the task, which felt more like hard labour, and because I met the author, who I found very interesting, unlike her tale - which appears was loosely biographical tales from her family. I also took it's promise on the cover at face value...

"Everything will be alright" - well I wished it had been, but unfortunately it wasn't. Shani 21.09.06