This author has the gift of deep insight into human's interactions and emotions, Dynamics in families.
The story tells the tale of Three sisters: one, Lucy, the oldest, marries a stolid, good, though unemotional man; one, Vera, marries a very good man, but is not in love with him and treats him very shabbily; and one, Charlotte, marries a total psychopathic narcissistic bully, who ruins their family and his wife.
It's a painful tale, but addictive. Especially painful to me because I married a man like Geoffrey. But I wasn't so weak like Charlotte; I left him, as hard as it was financially. I didn't want my girls to think that being a doormat to a man was "normal."
Charlotte's children suffer so much harm from their brutal father.
Vera, the beautiful sister, has married into a family that's rich. She, Charlotte, and Charlotte's youngest, Judith, go to visit Lucy, who lives out in the country. Lucy, out of loss for how to entertain the spoiled vira, takes them to town. Vera buys presents for all the children, a little washing set for Judith, a water pistol for her brother Stephen, and a gift for their older sister Margaret.
When Charlotte and Judith go home, Judith rushes into the house, excited to show Stephen their presence:
" '... Stephen, what d'you think auntie Vera sent you? What d'you think I chose? You'll never guess... I've..'
...'what the hell is this noise?' He said, through his teeth. " How d'you expect me to work with this row going on? It's judith, I suppose.'
His family looked at him in silence. Miss Cowley stepped backwards into the nursery; she avoided trouble.
'no one but that brat would dare to make such a noise,' he said. 'As far as I am concerned, charlotte, you can take her away again as soon as you like and you can stop away this time. You're both superfluous in this house. Stephen, come away from your mother. All this clinging and kissing is enough to make anybody sick. Stand away. And I thought I told you not to come downstairs,' he said advancing across the hall was sudden menace. Stephen scuttered upwards."

This next scene nearly brought me to tears. When I was in this position, I had the same thoughts, thinking if only my husband would decide to be happy, and to let our love flourish, what a wonderful partnership we could have. I even wrote him letters and poems, imploring him to understand how I felt. I was ignored.
This is how Charlotte was treated:
"Charlotte, changing for dinner, put down her brush and paused. She was seized by one of her old impulses to run down, throw her arms around Geoffrey's neck and implore him to let them be happy, to let them all be open and candid with one another, she and Geoffrey, the children, the maids. They could all be so happy together if only he would let them. But she took up her brush again. The last time she went down like that, he unloosed her arms and said with disgust: 'don't fawn on me.' not once had any of these appeals succeeded. He was not a man you could appeal to. His moods lasted as long as he chose; no appeal from outside could shorten them. In fact, he showed his resentment of any such supposition by making them, if implored to end them, last longer than ever. She went on with her dressing."

Now comes the punishment, for Charlotte allowing vera to buy the children presents. in the night time, inside their bedroom, Geoffrey lays into Charlotte:
" 'get out of my bed,' Geoffrey burst out again.'Go on. Get out. What man would want you in his bed? I won't have you in here at all. Get out of the room.'
'Geoffrey, how can i?' Wept charlotte. 'Where can I go? Think of the children.'
'you're getting out, anyway. Get out.'
Margaret [the oldest] fled into her bedroom, but she looked back, sobbing. The landing light went on and she saw her mother come out of the bedroom, her hair dishevelled, a dressing gown clutched around her shoulders. Charlotte closed the door carefully behind her and turned her piteous face about the landing as if she didn't know where to go. Then she went slowly to the stairs and in a moment the light was turned out again. Margaret, crying wildly, fumbled her way back to her bed. What she had seen and heard was too much for her. She couldn't bear it, she told herself. She couldn't bear it.
Charlotte went into the morning room and leant her forehead against the edge of the mantlepiece. Without melodrama, without vehemence of any kind, she wished to be dead, to be quiet somewhere, to be out of it all. 'It's no good trying to begin again,' she said to herself. 'I don't want to. I'd rather it ended.' "
This is the beginning of the end for charlotte, who begins to drink. It's the only way she can bear the pain that Geoffrey heaps on her.

A customer of Geoffrey gives him a dog, a little Terrier puppy. Geoffrey doesn't want it; nevertheless he brings it home to the children. For years the children have been begging him for a dog. They are wild with happiness, and the little dog returns their love. They name him Crusoe. Right away crusoe learns to avoid Geoffrey, who will kick him.
As time goes on Geoffrey gets more and more angry at seeing the children's delight in their little pet. He's determined to destroy their happiness. when they take a family vacation, he forbids the little dog to come along. Stephen and Margaret are to ride their bicycles to the Inn, 8 miles away. Stephen can't bear to leave Crusoe behind, so he smuggles him with them in a little basket. When Geoffrey finds out, he forces The innkeeper to keep the dog.
They go home, and a couple of days later crusoe shows up, having run all the way to their house.
They tried to hide him in Stephen's bedroom, but the worst is to come:
" 'stephen...' she said, gulping pitiously. 'Stephen...'
'what is it?' He said sharply. 'Quick! What happened? Crusoe?'
Judith nodded, struggling with her tears.
'He's gone,' she brought out. 'Daddy found him. Cook said he was crying in your room. She thought his paws were hurting him so she went in and daddy came in behind her. He took him away, but cook doesn't think he took him back to Mrs purley because he was only away a little while. He's in there... ' Judith nodded towards the morning room.
Stephen went to the door, flung it open and walked in.
Geoffrey looked up from his desk.
'What the hell do you mean by coming in here like that?' he said.
'Where's Crusoe?' Ask stephen, coming to clutch the front of the desk with both hands. 'Where is he?'
'get out.'
'where's crusoe? Tell me. Tell me where he is.'
'Your dog's gone,' said geoffrey, leaning forward and speaking with malicious slowness and clarity. 'I took it to the police station this morning and had it destroyed. So now perhaps you'll understand that I mean to be obeyed, my boy...'
Stephen's face drained slowly and completely of color, even to his lips. He stared with darkening eyes at his father, taking in the dreadful truth. Crusoe was dead. After all his struggle to get home, his courage, he had been destroyed. The word sank into the boy's very self. Destroyed. Crusoe - so alive, so loving."

Vera's husband Bryan wants her to go with him to America. Vera doesn't want to though, she wants to stay with her parties and her gentleman friend paying her tribute. But she's beginning to get old. A man, Terry, in her social circle, who is married to a rich woman, begins to pay attention to her.
"...'as if she knows anything about the torture of loving terry,' thought Vera, turning her head away. 'I didn't want to fall in love. Why should I have kept out of love all these years and then fall in love at my age with a man years younger than myself? Is it a thing I should choose? Why should I have to keep bothering about my looks, fussing about my hair and my face and my figure, i, who have never had to do it until now? Why should I keep listening for the telephone now, when I used to tell them to take the receivers off so that I shouldn't be annoyed? Why should I torture myself wondering if he loves me, and knowing he doesn't -- not yet, anyway.' "

Lucy has had to keep her mouth shut and regards to Jeffries treatment of his family. But when she comes to visit Charlotte, and sees the bloated, sick person her sister has become, she can't hold back anymore; she goes to speak to Geoffrey in the morning room:
" 'there's a fire in the nursery, I understand,' he said, intimidating that her presence was not required.
But she closed the door and came towards him.
'Geoffrey,' she said. 'I'm afraid Charlotte is drinking too much.'
his reception of this was startling. He burst into loud laughter. 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' He laughed, throwing his head back and showing all his teeth. Lucy stared speechlessly. 'it's taken you all this time to discover that, has it? Where are your wits or your eyes? Your sister not only drinks, my dear lucy, but is more or less permanently sozzled.'
Still speechless, Lucy's face hardened with anger.
'Your sister has been drinking for years,' said geoffrey, narrowing his eyes at her and speaking with precision.
'You've known that, and still you've had all this stuff about?' Lucy pointed to the whiskey standing as usual on his table.
Geoffrey shrugged his shoulders. 'Once women start to drink there's no doing anything with them. They're not like men. There's hope for a man who drinks, but never for a woman.'
'no, because a woman has given up hope before she starts to drink. It's the end before she begins. A woman doesn't drink for fun, like a man, she drinks in despair. When you found out that Charlotte was drinking you ought to have cleared every bottle of whiskey out of the house and never allowed another in. You ought to have stopped drinking yourself.' "

In the terrible end of Charlotte:
"Crossing the landing she saw that the door of the turret room was slightly open and with the realization coming fully home to her again that Charlotte was really dead, she went in to look at her once more while she could, and there was Vera kneeling by the bed, her sister's Dead hand in hers. Lucy went to her, but she couldn't speak. They knelt side by side, weeping.
'Come away, darling.' said Lucy at last. She didn't know how long Vera had been there. She thought it must have been ever since she heard that Rustle on the stairs. 'Come along, vera. We've no need to cry for her. Whatever she's suffered, it's over now. Let's leave her to god.'
She took Vera out of the room and into her own, but Vera threw herself down by the bed, her face still in her hands. She was suffering not only from the shock of seeing the change illness and death had made in charlotte, but from the sense of guilt the dead bring home to the living, the consciousness of things left undone, of chances wasted...."

This does have a happy ending, unlike the previous book I read by this author, called "someone at a distance." This author's writing is so miraculous, there are hardly words to describe it. Supposedly she had a happy childhood, which makes me wonder how she has this insight into the misery that humans make for each other, and moreover, be able to describe it and write about it in such an empathetic manner.
I will be reading much more of this author. ( )

As you would expect from a Dorothy Whipple book, They Were Sisters is a novel all about emotion and complex relationships.

When their mother dies suddenly, Lucy has the role of mothering her siblings thrust upon her, a role which is little appreciated by her sisters despite her best efforts to nurture and protect. Most of the novel takes place some years later, when the three sisters are all married and as siblings they're very much out of step with each other. Lucy is childless and contentedly married to a man we perceive to be much older than her, but she retains her nurturing ways, trying to help her sisters and their children as their lives veer off the rails. Her sister Charlotte, the most timid of the three, has married a raucous drinker who is a tyrant in the home, gas-lighting the nervous Charlotte at every opportunity and ignoring two of his three children whilst bestowing all his energies and interest on his oldest daughter. Meanwhile Vera, a head-turning beauty, has married a wealthy man she's completely disinterested in, and has no compunction about running around with other men in front of him whilst taking little to do with her own two daughters.

Dorothy Whipple has a warmth and gentleness to her writing, and is very much character-driven. The writing of this book was interrupted by the outbreak and distractions of war, and although it sold very well (so much so that it was made into a film in 1945 starring James Mason) Whipple was self-critical of the end product.

They Were Sisters wasn't as page-turning as Someone at a Distance, but Whipple writes about both strong and flawed women characters with an early feminist lens.

3.5 stars - enjoyable, but not one that will stick in my mind for too long. ( )

I belong to a Facebook group called First Edition, run by the Times Literary Supplement (London, that is). They often link to articles in that section, and one was about Dorothy Whipple, the "1930s Jane Austen." This was the recommended book to begin with and I'm so glad I had a chance to read this work by an author I had never previously known about.
They Were Sisters is the story of three sisters (they have brothers who figure very little in the story). Lucy, the eldest, ends up essentially raising the younger two after their mother dies young. Charlotte marries young, to a man the other two instantly despise, and with good reason as it turns out. Vera, the beauty of the family, marries a rich man and lives a Bright Young Thing life with lots of admirers. Both Charlotte and Vera have children; Lucy, ironically, does not, although she alone is happy in her marriage. The book follows their lives and troubles with emphasis on how Lucy, still trying to mother her sisters and, eventually, their children, deals with her sisters' bad choices.
As an eldest sister myself, though with far less responsibility, I resonated to Lucy's challenges and her essentially good heart. I see why Whipple is compared to Austen -- her powers of observation are equal to Austen's although the society she observes has changed a great deal since Regency days. If you like Jane Austen or are not prejudiced against domestic fiction, I recommend this book very highly. I plan to explore more of Dorothy Whipple's books. ( )

This was a book club pick - and one of the best discussions (and venues) we’ve had in a long time. Good pick - and good discussion questions - from Rachel.

Lucy, Charlotte and Vera grow up in the early years of the twentieth century. The early part of the book focuses on the bonds between the sisters - including Lucy’s mothering role and Charlotte and Vera’s closeness (not unlike the Pride and Prejudice girls). Their mother is dead, and father and brothers are almost invisible - until the brothers return from war as rowdy and chaotic as they left. The older brothers are packed off across the Atlantic, the youngest takes on his father’s firm and disappears again from the text.

Charlotte marries Geoffrey - the loud, charismatic and attention-seeking friend of their brothers. Vera is astoundingly beautiful and marries Brian, who she finds dull and boring, but who really wants to have a good family life and to read aloud to his wife and children. Lucy marries William - he is older and often brusque, but also thoughtful and loves her undemonstratively for herself. This is not a plot-driven book, and the story moves slowly - but it is deeply and compellingly a story about people and relationships.

The book invites us to judge the characters - although the narration moves into and out of each character’s perspective, the authorial voice provides commentary and invites us to judge too.

Lucy is decent, loving and good. She finds a friend and soulmate in her husband, and surrogate children in the nieces she takes in and nurtures. The warmth and love in their relationship is not fizzing and exciting, but shown in affectionate jokes, mutual understanding and small signs of consideration - such as her pleasure in getting home to him, and his remembering a particular book that she wanted.

Vera is vapid - vain, self-obsessed and foolish, in some ways she is the character who seems most to reflect the roaring twenties of the book. Brian is well-meaning, indulgent and loving but allows his family to fall apart - his mother drives a wedge between the children and judges Sarah as harshly as Vera, and he splits the family and then abandons Vera and Sarah to start what is probably a better life in America with the governess. Vera has moments of insight and self-awareness, but will not put herself out to intervene in Charlotte’s decline or to look after her daughters; and she chooses blindly to chase after Terry in the naive hope that things will work out.

Geoffrey is horrid - a cruel and manipulative bully who drives his family apart. Charlotte bears her own culpability - she does not stand up to him, fails to defend her children and her fall into alcoholism ends in a disgusting state. Each of the children has a different response - Margaret’s grooming is disturbing, Stephen becomes a ball of controlled rage and then runs away to sea. Judith is the youngest, learns to opt out of the worst and finds a surrogate mother in Lucy.

This is a book of its time - although there are echos of the social mores of nineteenth century novels, we see the Great War and the build up to the second world war, and we can observe the slow changes in society in the way that women and men relate to others, and through the portrayal of maids and servants. But it speaks to us now - the misery of these relationships and the difficulties of facing up to them prompted my book group into a big discussion about ourselves and the people we know. ( )

Compulsively readable, 'They were sisters' follows the familiar trope of the three sisters and their differing fates. The novel veers between carefully observed domestic realism and old-fashioned melodrama, with some moments of good psychological insight. The portrait of the abusive relationship between one of the sisters and her husband is harrowing and accurate, particularly the description of the day to day bullying of the wife and children and its psychological and emotional consequences; although Geoffrey's moments of out-and-out villiany are rather melodramatic. ( )