Mrs. Donald
   Mary Keene
  1983 Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press London UK
   ISBN: 0701127503


Mrs. Donald is a widow, living a mean life with her five children in London's East End. She's a bully who's out of control with nobody to keep her honest until Mr. Matthew takes an interest.

My longtime friend Alice Keene, sent me a copy of her mother's book & I was warily interested in reading it, surprised at how much the words reminded me of my best friend's mother. In some places as I read, I could hear her voice, as she used to recount, all those years ago, fragments of her early life, undoubtedly censored for my tender ears!

Alice Thomas Ellis posthumously edited Mrs. Donald.

This little volume reminded me, often, of an E. M. Forster novel. Perhaps, so much infused in the times & places.

I deeply enjoyed Mary Keene's keen eye & her ability to record what she's seen, what she's thought, what's she's known. Mrs. Donald is filled with passionate girls & boys, adults & fools. Were we that desperate? That terrified of our elders, be they our parents or our siblings? I was.

How do you survive the kind of battering that grinding domination of a parent whose very absence is an opportunity for celebration? Each offspring of Mrs. Donald has developed their individual ways of coping. When the cat's away the mice will gladly play together; it's when the cat comes back that the siblings turn on each other, hoping to deflect the wrath of their mother.

That wrath is awesome! Mary Keene has captured the waves of rage & derision, fear & shame which roil, like a cataract, through Mrs. Donald. It seems the more tender the moment this despairing woman sees, the quicker is the spasm & the greater the urge to destroy. Rose, perhaps because of her age, gender & prettiness, is the prime target of her mother's fury, the sons too get salvos although the way the boys handle the assaults differ: they cajole & walk away. Rose & Violet cringe, freeze & go numb, thus inciting even more incomprehensible fury.

What a grisly read this could have been, the author did, however, transform it into redemption by book's end. Glimmers of awareness begin showing in Mrs. Donald's madness, even as her girls run off into lives of their own.

On any day, take a walk down a street where factory or mine workers' families live, remember the sootiness of a coal-driven city & the dreariness of a long, cold winter: this is the drab insanity that haunts everyone in Mary Keene's book & why the epilogue by her daughter, Alice Keene is as bright & restorative as the red brush sketch by Sir Matthew Smith on the cover of Mrs. Donald.
(04/18/99)

Rebecca