Cornflower: Great expectations

This is an excellent book but an uncomfortable read. Joanna Cannan's "Princes in the Land" was first published in 1938 and re-issued by Persephone Books last year. It looks at what happens when expectations and reality do not match, and it explores identity, specifically how a woman's identity may be given away (willingly) for love and then subsumed under the layers of life as a wife and mother.

It is a story full of compromise and disaffection, charting a mother's selflessness and what she is left with when her children are grown and have to live with their own ill-advised choices. It could be about every woman, and none, but it's a stark story, carefully and poignantly told.

Marriage to a penniless academic requires the aristocratic Patricia to cancel her subscription to "Horse & Hound" and take up "Woman & Home" instead. Long before 'reinventing oneself ' was ever heard of, she determines to adjust to motherhood and suburban, Glasgow-villa life and continues to stifle her own spirit as her husband settles into his seamless existence as an Oxford professor only vaguely engaged with his family. She gives her all for her children, and in return they find themselves unable to distinguish her in any way; she is just "mother.......out of focus; blurred".

I find myself in unusually sombre mood after reading this book, which means that Joanna Cannan has done what she must have set out to do - not to depress, but rather to make her readers examine what they set most store by and how delight and disappointment can be almost interchangeable. "Be careful what you wish for, for you shall surely get it, ....... and other things besides".