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Characters who believe that usually get a rude comeuppance. But Godwin places her women in an extremely amiable world. Their wills are not thwarted, their plans are not crushed by reality. They do not face discrimination or sexism but rather an excess of love from those around them. Cate meets the father of one of her students; he turns out to be a millionaire industrialist who lives in a castle on the banks of the Mississippi River. Before long, he asks her to marry him: "Oh hell, she thought, why couldn't this be the thirteenth century? Then it would all be decided for me." Lydia's tender trap appears in the form of a handsome podiatrist in Winston-Salem. Their lovemaking inspires her to write a term paper on Eros for one of the college courses she is now taking. Lydia discusses the topic with her professor, a Harvard-educated black woman: "I don't know where this sort of thing fits in my life, or whether I can make it fit, or whether I even want it to fit. That's why I'd like to get to the bottom of whatever this thing is."
The notion of winnowing out the dark secret of sex through a college composition is comic. It is also, coming from Lydia at this point, endearing. Godwin's long, leisurely narrative is too inclusive and ingratiating to encourage snap judgments or condemnations. She allows her women to be as naive or foolish as they wish, but she also weighs in the balance the fact that they are striving toward a vision, however unclear. Near the end, she lets them realize most of it. A coda assembles all the surviving characters for a reunion on a North Carolina mountain in the fall of 1984. Nell, Cate and Lydia are happy in ways that they would have chosen, and did in fact choose. The hills are alive with the sound of music.
This idyllic conclusion seems inevitable, given the events that have preceded it. Spurned suitors do not stalk off but remain on call, ready to be helpful whenever the women they love need them. Lydia's sons do not resent the disruptions their mother has imposed on their lives; they remain obedient and promising. When Cate needs a job and a place to live, both appear. Thanks to the dead father and the abandoned banker and the rejected millionaire, there is enough money on tap to keep Nell, Cate and Lydia as comfortable and restless as they could wish.
Such behavior is preposterous, and why not? Despite its abundance of realistic details, A Mother and Two Daughters is at heart an old story in brand-new clothes. This time around, Rochester does not get Jane Eyre; she tells him to keep his distance while she manages the estate. Godwin's version of this turnabout is entertaining and stereoscopic. Her novel can be read as a straightforward account of three plucky women imposing their wills on a receptive world; it can also be seen as a gentle comedy of the unfettered consciousness. Viewed both ways at once, it is engrossing and deep. —By Paul Gray