Product Description

The Bawtry family has been in South Yorkshire for generations when Bessie is born just before the turn of the last century. The Bawtrys have been content with their humble lot, but Bessie longs for the freedom promised by a new beginning. However, when she succeeds in being admitted to Cambridge and ascends to a new world of culture and rarified comforts, the tug of her family’s history remains, binding her to the past in ways she doesn’t entirely understand. Nearly a century later, Faro Gaulden finds her way back to the little mining town where her mother and her grandmother Bessie grew up. But for all Faro’s exotic ancestry and glamour, she wonders if she has really travelled away from home, and finds herself asking how is it that unforeseen events and encounters can alter forever what would seem to have been determined. Abounding with lively characters, sadness, and subversive wit, this is Margaret Drabble at her storytelling best.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297259 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-04
• Released on: 2002-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Amazon.com
In The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble chronicles four generations in the life of a family, homing in on the female line and attempting to explain how genes, DNA, and environment can change or challenge an individual. The tale begins with Bessie Bawtry, a gifted young woman from a South Yorkshire mining town who fails to live up to her promise. It ends with her granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, "a bobby dazzler" radiant with opportunities and ideas, who nonetheless can't quite make the most of what she has. All of this would produce a fairly straightforward and enjoyable tale of family life--and inherited characteristics--but for Drabble's tone, which is, frankly, uneasy. It wavers from the clinical voice-over ("We must try to rediscover the long-ago infant in her vanished world") to the mawkish elegy ("O poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you?").

What happened? Drabble's afterword, in fact, explains a great deal of this waywardness. Bessie Bawtry, with her hard-won education, her relinquishing lapses into illness, and her life of deferred pleasures, is based on the author's mother. Consequently, there is the sense of filling in biographical gaps with fictional plots and characters, and then carefully plastering everything into place with a thin layer of scientific metaphor. Drabble, alas, is too personally involved with this material, and her prose suffers. It juts and jars at awkward angles, reducing The Peppered Moth to a gawky adolescent of a book instead of a mature, measured reflection on family history. --Eithne Farry

From Publishers Weekly
One scarcely recognizes Drabble's (The Witch of Exmoor, etc.) customary satirical verve in this thinly veiled fictional account of her mother's life. According to the author's afterword, it was painful to write; moreover, it's painful to read. The essential unlovability of the central character is accentuated by Drabble's tone throughout, which she admits is "harsh, dismissive, censorious. As she was." The fictional Bessie Bawtry is born in a Yorkshire coal-mining town during the early years of the 20th century. From childhood on, she is precociously intelligent and fastidious, carping and contemptuous. A manipulative martyr, Bessie is determined to escape her dowdy family and dismal surroundings, but though she wins a scholarship to Cambridge, her ignominious return to her hometown after graduation can be lived down only by marriage to affable Joe Barron. Forever dissatisfied, Bessie thereafter uses her caustic tongue to inflict her bitterness and resentment on her husband and children. Drabble animates the narrative somewhat through Bessie's daughter, Crissie, who manages to surmount her own dreadful marriage, and Bessie's granddaughter, journalist Faro Gaulden. Readers accustomed to Drabble's trenchant commentary on social conditions will welcome her interpolations on anthropological theories, gene research and social migration, all of which add depth to the story. At least one scene, of a funeral attended by the deceased's two wives, five mistresses and many offspring, legitimate and otherwise, represents Drabble at her best. But an author must have some sympathy for her protagonist, and Drabble seems to have none for Bessie. Her statement, again in the afterword: "I feel, in writing this, that I have made myself smell of dead rat" says it all. 3-city author tour. (Apr.) Forecast: Readers looking for insight into Drabble's background, and that of her sister, novelist A.S. Byatt, will find this book interesting and illuminating, but most of her fans won't be pleased with this outing, which should dampen sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Do our genes predetermine our family stories, or are we able to create ourselves from our own unique set of circumstances? The nature/nurture debate comes to the fore in Drabble's fictional exploration into her family's genealogy and her attempt to come to terms with her mother's unhappy history. Against a backdrop of scientific inquiry into biological determinism, Drabble limns a history of three generations with particular focus on Bessie Bawtry, who comes of age as a cosseted, sickly girl in Yorkshire in the Twenties. Remarkably, for those unenlightened times, she is encouraged by her family and teacher to attend Cambridge University, where she is overwhelmed by the intellectual and social milieu. This is the start of her lifelong tendency to retreat to her bed in the face of social discomfort. Despite her fortunate beginnings, marriage to a childhood sweetheart, and relative prosperity, Bessie is never able to rise above her demons and, as seen through the journalistic eyes of her granddaughter, that mystery is never resolved. Ultimately, this novel fails to catch fire. Nevertheless, Drabble is sure to be in demand, and public libraries will need to purchase.
-DBarbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.