Ostensibly a sedate family saga, it evolves into a deeply convincing manifesto on the rights of women to self-determination and social, educational, financial and sexual equality. Set in the decades before, during, and immediately after the Great War, centre stage is shared between a family matron and her granddaughter, representatives of the old world and the new, with sporadic but telling secondary roles played by the adult children of the household, their various spouses, lovers, friends and acquaintances.

The ending was unexpected, and deeply satisfying in its blunt refusal to neaten things up in a conventional way; it shocked me because I’d rather expected Whipple to manufacture an eleventh-hour cluster of pleasantly innocuous solutions to its most pressing dilemmas, and she didn’t go there at all. And it worked.

Full review at Leaves and Pages blog:
https://leavesandpages.com/2016/02/13/greenbanks-by-dorothy-whipple-what-did-i-j... ( )

Dorothy Whipple is a master at writing long, slowly developing stories that ultimately deliver a strong emotional impact. Or at least, that's my opinion after reading two of her novels. Greenbanks is an early 20th century family saga about the Ashton family, consisting of widowed matriarch Louisa, her adult children, and their families. Each child has a coming-of-age story arc, and there's no sugar coating here. Life is filled with challenges: bad marriages, failed careers, poor investments, and the like. Louisa and her daughters are often at the mercy of men, who are generally hapless and make things worse rather than better. Louisa's sons-in-law, Ambrose and George, were particularly fine examples, but happily they eventually get what they deserve.

After the last of Louisa's children leaves home, she takes in a companion, Kate Barlow, who was banished from the village years before after having a child out of wedlock. Besides companionship, Louisa hopes to return Kate to society, but she will have none of that. Louisa also dotes on her granddaughter Rachel, one of my favorite characters, who represents the hopes and dreams of a new generation of women.

There are several plot threads winding their way through this novel, which are more or less resolved but in an open-ended way that left me thinking about the lives of these characters in the years that followed. ( )

Louisa's family is very varied with the best of the bunch, Laura, running away with her true love and leaving her wealthy but uninteresting husband behind. Louisa hosts everyone at Greenbanks at one time or another and never gets over-involved in their self inflicted problematic lives. Didn't think much of this one. Usually truly enjoy the Persephone books.

The central figure (and my favourite character) here is the child Rachel, who frequently visits her grandmother Louisa at her home Greenbanks. I was reminded of the "Young Anne", one of my mother's books, also by Whipple, who made me laugh so much when I was a lot younger when she thwacked the berries off a houseplant, treating them like naughty children. Whipple gets very easily into the mind of a child. Greenbanks is the story of an ordinary family before and just after WWI, until Rachel becomes independent, defies her authoritative father and falls in love; I found it at once cosy and refreshing, amusing, and a good study of love and family relationships. The ending came as a surprise because I still had several pages to read - but there is an afterword (and I'm glad it was after and not an introduction as it would have spoiled the story). ( )

After the disappointment of struggling with a book I didn’t like, I needed to read something that I knew I would love. So I reached for a Persephone book – and Dorothy Whipple has never let me down. This was the last of her books currently re-issued by Persephone books that I had left to read. As expected it was lovely and an enormous joy to read, only now I have no Whipples to look forward to – and that is awful.
“The house was called Greenbanks, but there was no green to be seen today; all the garden was deep in snow”
So starts this charming 1932 novel from Dorothy Whipple which is essentially about a family before and after the Great War. Louisa Ashton is a woman in late middle age married to the philandering Robert, with six grown up children. The novel opens at Christmas; Louisa has her enormous family around her, including her favourite grandchild Rachel who is just four. From the end of 1909 to the mid nineteen twenties ‘Greenbanks’ charts the ups and downs of this family, viewed through the eyes of the child Rachel and her adored grandmother Louisa.
There are familiar Dorothy Whipple themes in this novel, set against the backdrop of domestic middle-class England. Domineering bullying men, and the women, who are partially at least suppressed by them. Ambrose; Rachel’s father and Louisa’s son-in-law is one, inflexible and dictatorial. He and Louisa’s son Jim thwart Louisa continually in both matters of finance and her favourite son, the charming slightly feckless Charles – who they manage to send away - twice. Ambrose also father to three boys older than Rachel – has his own ideas about female education and behaviour. Yet we also have women – who are either supressed by convention and society or who bravely buck it. Laura the youngest of Louisa’s daughters marries a man she doesn’t love, and when later she decides to run off with another man she declares she doesn’t care for what people think of her. Letty married to Ambrose watches her life ebb away, finding herself married to man she once thought solid, and now is constantly irritated by. Letty awaits a legacy from her Aunt Alice, and when years later, it finally comes, she has as surprise for Ambrose, who has already decided that he should take charge of the money.
Kate Barlow who once had a child out of wedlock has had her life blighted by the stain of scandal and shame. She comes to Greenbanks as companion to Louisa – who having known Kate as a child is desperate to help her, but Kate has closed herself off from people – and is a sad pale shadow of her former self.
“Kate continued to be quite unlike her letters. When Lizzy was gone she made herself very busy in the house, going about her work swiftly and quietly, but without heart.
One evening when she was sitting with Louisa in the drawing-room, she let slip that she had never liked being a companion.
“I tried selling cutlery door to door. I went out sewing by the day and took sewing in. I bought a knitting machine. But I couldn’t keep myself,” said Kate, looking at Louisa with dark, discomforting eyes. “This is the only way I can keep myself”
“oh” murmured Louisa, fumbling in embarrassment with her knitting. “I am very sorry dear.”

However after a few years at Greenbanks, Kate develops a great affection for the new Vicar when she is about 40 – seeing in him her chance of happiness at last – but I won’t reveal how that story strand ends.
Rachel’s father prevents her from taking up a scholarship to Oxford, finally relents a year later, but the scholarship is gone and Rachel must be content to being a three times a week scholar at Liverpool, delighted she is allowed to study at last, but it comes a very poor second to Oxford.
The real heroines of this novel are of course Louisa and her granddaughter Rachel; it is through their eyes that we see everyone and everything else. They are real allies particularly against Ambrose and have a wonderful relationship.
Dorothy Whipple’s writing is straightforward and no nonsense, she is less showy and flowery than some of her literary contemporaries– and this says Charles Lock – in his excellent Afterword –
“account for Dorothy Whipple’s years of neglect, for the ill-informed dismissal of her name, on those few occasions on which it might have been raised.”
I love her books and the six novels and one volume of short stories that Persephone publish I know are enormously popular – and justifiably so in my opinion. ( )