Born in the Lancashire town of Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple (1893–1966) wrote eight very successful novels and a collection of short stories between 1927 and 1953. Like Jane Austen, her deceptively simple narratives chart the warp and weft of middle-class family life while subtly revealing uncomfortable truths about gender, power and patriarchy. While her books fell into obscurity for some years after her death, the publishing house Persephone, which reprints forgotten mid-twentieth-century women’s fiction, has now reissued nearly all of Whipple’s works to substantial acclaim.
They Were Sisters (1943) can be seen as typical of Whipple’s writing in terms of both style and theme. Successfully filmed in 1945, this comparative study of Lucy, Vera and Charlotte Field is an honest and compelling dissection of the impact of marriage on the lives of middle-class women trained from birth for little else. Each of the Field sisters’ lives is scripted by her choice of husband in a way that Jane Austen would certainly have recognised, even if the social and cultural contexts are significantly different.
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