Loving Daughters: A Novel

by Olga Masters

Overview

"Loving Daughters" takes place in a small village in New South Wales and is a brilliant, unsentimental portrait of two sisters: one artistic and restless, the other houseproud and her father's favorite. The entry of an eligible young man into their lives creates a disturbing triangle of desire and rivalry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393333480
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/1993
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Olga Masters was a journalist who wrote for the "Manly Daily" and the "Sydney Morning Herald." She is the author of the critically acclaimed "Amy's Children"; "A Long Time Dying"; and "The Home Girls," which won a National Book Council Award.

Editorial Reviews

Although Masters ( Amy's Children ; The Rose Fancier ) is a keen observer of domestic life, her work has been rather overshadowed in this country by that of fellow Australian Elizabeth Jolley, despite the fact that they share little more than their homeland. The present novel, which dates from 1984, and was her first published fiction--she was already in her 50s at the time--is like an odd blend of Thomas Hardy and early D. H. Lawrence, but with a style quirkier and more homespun than either. It tells of an extended family in a tiny provincial hamlet in New South Wales in the early 1920s, just after WW I: elderly, cossetted Jack, his eminently marriageable daughters Enid and Una, their brothers George, Alex and Henry, their aunt Violet, her shell-shocked husband Edgar (Ned)--and Colin Edwards, a young minister freshly arrived from England. As the girls cast covetous eyes on Edwards, and he on them, as Violet yearns to open her own little maternity home and be rid of Ned, and as all their lives are affected by the arrival of Henry's baby, Small Henry, Masters eavesdrops wryly on their longings and spites, painting their fearfully circumscribed world with such precision that even the horses are deftly characterized. There is almost no resolution: Edwards marries what turns out to be probably the wrong sister for him, Small Henry vanishes from their lives, more frustration and regret loom. It is a curiously old-fashioned novel, with a peculiar sensibility that will be familiar to Masters's devoted fans. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Published for the first time in the United States, this debut novel by award-winning Australian writer Masters ( The Rose Fancier , LJ 8/91) tells of Wyndham, a small, rural community south of Sydney, in the days following World War I. The two young Herbert sisters, who keep house for their widowed father and bachelor brothers, are as different as can be. Enid, the elder, is a capable manager, running the household and garden with great efficiency, while her sister, Una, is more frivolous and rather dreamy. When the Rev. Colin Edwards arrives from England in 1919 to serve as Wyndham's pastor, both sisters are ready for love, which leads to tensions between the women and within the Herbert family unit. The combination of Masters's finely drawn characters and tightly woven narrative successfully conveys the cadence of small-town country life in a bygone era. This is recommended for most fiction collections.-- Maria A. Perez-Stable, Western Michigan Univ. Libs., Kalamazoo

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