My affection for Molly Keane’s novels deepens with each book I read. The Rising Tide, published in 1937 under her pseudonym of M J Farrell, was her eighth novel and the third I’ve read (the others were Good Behaviour and Devoted Ladies). Like them, The Rising Tide depicts the world of the great houses and landed families in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930, at a time when their way of life was giving way to less traditional values.
The Rising Tide is a masterful study of two powerful women who each seek to exert supreme control over their households and families. It’s also a battle between two ways of life — that of the Edwardian era with its rigid conventions and clothing and the world of the 1920s with its more liberated values and attitudes.
Representing Edwardian conservatism is Lady Charlotte French-McGrath, matriarch of Garonlea, a vast Gothic style house over which she wields total control,. She’s a cold woman “mean, although not so mean as her husband whom she had taught to be mean” dictating her views on parenting, social life and relationships to the detriment of her children who bear the brunt of her strictures.
Her nemesis is her daughter-in-law, Cynthia Hamish, a woman whose ethos reflects the spirit of a new age. At first the older woman bestows approval on her son Desmond’s choice of partner. But Cynthia doesn’t turn out to be as compliant as Charlotte anticipates or expects. Worse still, she threatens to disrupt the household as the McGrath children gravitate towards her and away from their mother.
Cynthia and Desmond establish a rival base at their own home, Rathglass, where the Garonlea values of tradition and formality are replaced by a passion for current fashions and the liberal attitudes of the Jazz Age. Cynthia’s power reaches its ascendancy when she seizes control of Garonlea after Lady Charlotte’s death. But the wheel comes full circle when, just like her mother-in-law had experienced, her values and authority are rejected by her offspring.
The portraits of the two rivals form the core of the novel. They seem almost monstrous in the way they seek to control their children’s lives. In neither case however, is this about ensuring certain social standards are maintained — it’s more about ensuring that the mother remains the centre of attention.
Lady Charlotte loved her daughters with a passion none the less genuine if it demanded first their unquestioning obedience, and fed itself on a profound jealousy of any interest in their lives other than those she might herself prompt or provide. .. She absolutely required that her children shouldprove a justification, as she should see it, of herself.
Lady Charlotte expects nothing but complete obedience to her rules about clothing and food and opinions on the suitability of friends and associates. Towards her daughter Enid she displays a particularly cruel streak, at first denying the girl contact with a man she considers an unsuitable suitor, then forcing her into an unwanted marriage.
Cynthia is just as fixated on dictating how her children should behave. She’s passionate about riding and hunting so insist that her children embrace this pursuit wholeheartedly.
She did not love her children but she was determined not to be ashamed of them. You had to feel ashamed and embarrassed if your children did not take to blood sports, so they must be forced into them. It was right. It was only fair to them. You could not bring a boy up properly unless he rode and fished and shot. What sort of boy was he? What sort of friends would he have?”
Her sister in law Diana detects in this attitude a streak of cruelty in the way Cynthia treats her children.
She [Cynthia] was so wonderful about not spoiling Susan. How good it was for Susan to be teased. How well Simon rode and how Cynthia would stand no nonsense from him about not liking his pony or from Susan either for that matter. Let them fall off, she always said, that’s the way they’ll learn …
It’s interesting that Diana proves to be so astute about this aspect of Cynthia’s character yet fails to recognise how she herself is abused by the woman.
Diana seeks refuge at Rathglass, having challenged but failed to change her mother’s demanding ways. Life at Rathglass is so much more fun than the dreary existence at Garonlea and Diane longs to be invited to move in permanently. She sees herself as Cynthia’s friend and ally but what is obvious to the reader is that really she’s just being used, tolerated because she’s so useful with the children and the garden, a worker bee who exists only to support Queen Bee Cynthia.
Charlotte is a horrid woman but Cynthia takes the biscuit, becoming increasingly manipulative, self-centred and thoughtless as she grows older. Her attempts to hold on to the lifestyle she values most are doomed to failure when there is a younger generation looking for something very different.
The characters really make this novel. Cynthia and Charlotte take pride of place in The Rising Tide as the Queens of their respective hives but there are many others on the periphery who are just as well drawn. And as always Molly Keane captures perfectly the world of the large Irish country houses and the Anglo-Irish aristocracy: a social class in decline, although its members had yet to realise their days were numbered.