Behind the Scenes at the Museum
By Kate Atkinson
Published 1995
Read July 2023; November 2023
Our book club is going to discuss this book soon so this reader decided to become refreshed on the details. (Our book club meets for 2.5 hours and the discussions are quite extensive so it’s good to be prepared.)
This reader’s first reading left the impression of a story of women generally until The Pill became available—your lot was either spinsterhood with the hope of living with a family member or going into service, or teaching, or an unhappy life being married with too many children and a household to manage. Several of the books this reader has happened upon lately show this same story in a variety of ways.
This reader’s second reading was informed by the first. But fortunately, there was much more to the book. Some topics covered: The difficulties of the brothers of those sisters when faced with being a solider and dying in the war or surviving it but…. The hopes of the various women for an exciting life or at least a life they like living. How mean young children can be and the consequences of their abrupt actions. And more and more.
The narrator, Ruby Lennox, provides us vivid scenes from many parts of her life from the moment of conception through to the end of her mother’s life. She is convinced at birth that her mother isn’t really her mother and she retains that feeling through most of her life. But perhaps it’s a feeling enabled by her mother’s surprise at living a life she didn’t intend, having a husband who isn’t who she thought he was, and having children that she didn’t plan to have but did have as a consequence of the marital bed.
In between thirteen chapters narrated by Rudy are “footnotes” that tell the story of Ruby’s mother Bunty, Bunty’s mother Nell, and Nell’s mother Alice: their pre-marriage situation, how they became a married woman, and how they dealt with that situation. There are also “footnotes” about the Nell’s brothers including scenes from their pre-war days and while in the war (The Great War).
Alice is the only one of these women who escapes her married life—by running off with the travelling photographer—but eventually has regrets about this. Nell’s sister Lillian has a child out-of-wedlock and leaves the country — an extreme way of leaving town. She does eventually marry but clearly has a different grip on life than her sister, mother, or niece. Although Ruby gives us a lot of detail about her early years and her sisters Patricia and Gillian during these years, she gives us little detail about her married life although she does indicate she and her friend Kathleen eventually divorce their respective husbands.
In summary this book gives an interesting look at womanhood in working-class England through a number of generations showing the similarities of their challenges and the variety of ways these women face them.
This reader definitely began to savor the book on second reading and was glad the second reading was undertaken. The richness of the writing approach and the characters was much more evident the second time through for this reader. I now look forward to the discussion and am now glad the book was on the season’s schedule.
MarshaReads.com 