The house of women

The house of women by Cookson, Catherine. Mass Market Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780552159227.

Emma Funnell is the matriarch of Bramble House, built for her as a wedding gift by Patrick Funnell who had since died. Now into her seventies, and with the avowed intent of living to be a hundred, Emma continued to keep the firmest of hands on domestic affairs and commercial interests. Under Emma’s roof and rule lived three more generations of the Funnell family, all of them women. Widowed daughter Victoria had over the years become increasingly preoccupied with hypochondria; granddaughter Lizzie bore the brunt of most matters concerned with the running of the house, as well as enduring a loveless marriage to Len Hammond, a bitter, frustrated man with little kindness in him and a good deal of suppressed violence; and great-granddaughter Peggy, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl trying to find the courage to drop a bombshell into their midst. For Peggy had become pregnant by one Andrew Jones, a bright grammar-school lad from an entirely different background. This might be 1968, but the family reaction was surely to be faced with great trepidation. This explosive situation provides the springboard for a powerful and wholly absorbing novel that explores, over a span of fifteen years, all that fate holds in store for the dwellers in the house of women and those whose lives they touch, reaching its climax with the frank confrontation of a major social issue today.