I guess I would have to call Justine Cowan's book a memoir, although it is also a biography and perhaps a psychological study of two women: Justine herself and her mother Eileen. The two had a very difficult relationship and were almost totally estranged by the time Eileen passed away. Her mother spoke with a rather practiced aristocratic British accent, and when she married an American GI and moved to California, she did everything possible to convey that she was upper crust. She forced Justine to take riding lessons (which she eventually grew to love), penmanship lessons, violin lessons with a Suzuki master, etiquette lessons, sent her away to boarding school and more, and she constantly criticized her daughter for behaving like or just longing to be a normal kid living a normal life. Her mother also had bouts of fierce rage, often directed at Justine. It got to the point that when Justine finally moved out to live on her own, she would ask her father to visit her alone--until her mother found out and the visits stopped altogether. Curiously, Eileen never talked about her family, even when Justine asked about grandparents or what her life had been like as a child. It wasn't until after her mother's death that she began to search for the puzzle pieces and fit them together. She recalled a time when her mother had phoned her, asking her to visit because at last she wanted to tell her about her past. Justine's response: "It's too late." When she began her research into Eileen's background after her death, she remembered that her mother had also sent her a handwritten autobiography years ago, but she had put it away unread.

Much to her surprise, Justine learned that Eileen had been born to an unwed mother and surrendered to Coram Foundling Hospital where she was given the name Dorothy Soames. She set out on a journey to London to learn as much as possible about her mother's family, her childhood in a rigid institutional environment, and her life after leaving Coram. What she learned finally gave Justine an understanding of her mother's personality and often strange behavior, and it also gave her insight into the effects this background may have had on her own development.

Overall, this was an interesting read--although at times I found Justine to be just as maddening and self-centered as her mother. If the book makes anything clear, it is that the psychologists were right when they determined that early childhood experiences shape our personalities and affect both the trajectory of our lives and the nature of our relationships. ( )

I was impressed with the author's prose style and was riveted by the narrative from the first page. There were a lot of elements in this story, most importantly the journal of the titular woman from her time in a foundling hospital in England and the story of Justine's life growing up with a mother who was not trained to be one. As a whole it was a fascinating, moving book; part history of the Foundling Hospital and the development of child psychology, part Cowan’s own story, and part that of Dorothy Soames (the name Cowan’s mother was given at the hospital).” The author's ability to blend these disparate parts together in a balanced narrative was what I most appreciated. In its totality It is a story that is both sad and uplifting. ( )

Rating: 3.5

In this competently written work—a combination of biography, memoir, and social history— Justine Cowan reflects on the life of her difficult, emotionally disturbed mother, Eileen, the “Dorothy Soames” of the book’s title. Shortly after her birth in January 1932, the infant Eileen was placed by Lena Weston, her unwed mother, in London’s Foundling Hospital, where she was promptly renamed Dorothy Soames. The institution, dating back to the 1700s, was founded by British sailor, shipbuilder, and philanthropist Thomas Coram as a refuge for illegitimate children. The original idea was that these poor unfortunates would be clothed, fed, housed, and trained for service (to the wealthy)—the boys, for a life at sea; the girls, for domestic service. Cowan demonstrates that although Dorothy’s bodily and medical needs were met, she and the other foundlings were deprived of essential emotional support and affection. In fact, some of the staff—most of whom were unmarried older women unable to find better employment—were downright sadistic. A teacher, Miss Woodword, was a particular terror to Dorothy from the time the girl was eight or nine years old. This woman beat Dorothy publicly and mercilessly. Once she even removed her from class for some mysterious infraction, only to throw her in the deep end of the on-site pool, using the long rescue pole to dunk the girl back under the water each time she struggled to the surface. The Foundling Hospital’s matron, Miss Wright, was another menacing figure. Carrying a leather strap, she regularly patrolled the corridors of the institution on the lookout for misbehaving girls. Solitary confinement was a practice adopted by the hospital long before Dorothy’s time, after one of the institution’s prominent governors wrote a pamphlet on the matter. Miss Wright reserved this most dire of punishments for Dorothy, whom she regarded as a bad seed. Numerous times the woman had the child locked up in cupboards, closets, and storerooms.

Justine Cowan was told none of these details verbally by her mother. When she was growing up, questions about Eileen’s past were strictly verboten. Justine was acutely aware that her mother had secrets. These appeared to be related to her being robbed of her standing as a descendant of the Welsh aristocracy. A demanding, hypercritical woman, Eileen was certainly preoccupied with social status. Also an accomplished pianist and painter, she was determined to produce a well-turned-out daughter. In childhood, the author had music and horseback-riding lessons. Private tutors for any number of subjects, including penmanship, regularly came to instruct Justine in the family home located in a desirable San Francisco neighbourhood. During her teenage years, Justine would go on to attend a prestigious boarding school. All bills were footed by her adored father, a prominent San Francisco attorney. Compliant with all of his wife’s wishes, he was the peacemaker, whose role in the family’s intense dysfunction would only become clear to Justine much later in life.

Given the childhood trauma she endured, Eileen had tremendous difficulty nurturing her daughter. Eileen was evidently mentally unstable—at times, even suicidal. During one episode, Justine’s father called her home from college in Berkeley to keep an eye on her mother, as he was due in court. Eileen couldn’t be left alone, he said. On that day the woman pressed a scrap of paper with the name “Dorothy Soames” into her nineteen-year-old daughter’s hand. Justine did not probe to find out the significance of the name. In fact, she soon put as many miles as possible between herself and her disturbed parent, moving from California to the southeastern US where she pursued a law degree and work in environmental protection. Communication and family visits were infrequent. As the years passed, Eileen attempted to broach the subject of her childhood, but her daughter, who had tallied a long list of resentments and allowed anger to harden into a protective carapace, refused to engage with her. A manuscript that Eileen eventually presented to Justine, documenting her experiences at the Foundling Hospital, was left unread for many years. In fact, it was only after a happy, later-in-life marriage and Eileen’s death from Alzheimer’s Disease that Justine begin to research her mother’s story.

Cowan’s book moves back and forth between her own growing-up years, her mother’s story, and the history of the Foundling Hospital. She’s clearly read and synthesized a great deal of information on the latter. It’s my impression that the history of institution rather drowned out the more personal story in the first half of the book. Abundant details about the Foundling Hospital and its governors became tedious to me and at times seemed irrelevant to Eileen/Dorothy’s story. I think a quarter of the book could safely have been cut. The pace improved considerably in the second half. At age twelve, Dorothy and another girl briefly escaped from the Foundling Hospital. Shortly after this, Dorothy’s birth mother reclaimed her, taking her to live in Shropshire. Sadly, details about this part of her story are almost completely lacking. The inference the author draws and supports is that this reunion did not go well. Cowan does manage to sympathetically and imaginatively present what she learned about her mother and grandmother, Lena Weston, from the Foundling Hospital’s records. However, this is no substitute for a personal, emotionally resonant oral history from her mother. I found that the book, especially in earlier sections, often read like a research project, an academic exercise. Eileen—“Dorothy Soames”—did not fully live on the page.

This is a sad story in so many ways. First of all, there’s the tragedy of women alone bearing the deep shame, stigma, and burden of pregnancies that they were obviously not solely responsible for. Unwed mothers seeking to place their infants at the Foundling Hospital had to undergo a lengthy process to determine if they were of good enough character to merit the privilege of having their illegitimate offspring accepted. Part of the procedure involved being interviewed and judged by the wealthy male governors. Later, when many of these women found themselves in a better financial situation and sought to reclaim their children, they were almost always denied; the governors knew best.

Cowan’s book also reminds us of another kind of sadness. Often we don’t appreciate until later in life what some difficult people we have known may have endured, their hardship and emotional pain. While understandable, it seems deeply unfortunate, even tragic to me, that Cowan and her mother could not have somehow bridged their fraught relationship so that peace of some kind could have been achieved while Eileen was still alive. Cowan’s book is a brave and honest effort to come to terms with how the harms inflicted on one person ripple down to the next generation. ( )

For almost three hundred years, London's Foundling Hospital took in unwanted illegitimate children and raised the girls to become household servants and the boys to become soldiers and sailors. The mother of author Justine Cowan was one such child. Known by the asylum-assigned name of "Dorothy Soames," she endured many privations, including a regimented lifestyle, poor education, and flavorless food. Because she was a spirited girl with an independent streak, she was also subject to beatings and stints in solitary confinement. Her story had a happier resolution than most; eventually she married a wealthy American lawyer and had two daughters, but the scars from her childhood remained. Through Cowan's research into the history of the Foundling Hospital, and her mother's own autobiographical account, the author comes to realize that her eccentric, aloof mother did not know how to be a mother because she had never been mothered herself.

The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames provides a heartfelt look at a troubled mother-daughter relationship, as well as a fascinating social history of the treatment of children born out of wedlock. Highly recommended. ( )