The Peppered MothThe prize-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises offers an “absorbing” portrait of three generations of women—inspired by her own family (The New York Times Book Review). In the early 1900s, young Bessie Bawtry grows up in a mining town in South Yorkshire, England. Unusually gifted, she longs to escape a life burdened by unquestioned tradition. She studies patiently, dreaming of the day when she will take the entrance exam for Cambridge and leave her narrow world. A generation later, Bessie’s daughter Chrissie feels a similar impulse to expand her horizons, which she in turn passes on to her own daughter. Nearly a century after that, Bessie’s granddaughter finds herself listening to a lecture on genetics and biological determinism. She has returned to Breaseborough and wonders at the families who remained in the humble little town where Bessie grew up. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the plain South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself—not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden and unexplained resurgence. With The Peppered Moth, the acclaimed author of The Seven Sisters conjures a captivating work of semi-fiction, grappling with her memory of her own mother and the indelible mark of family and heredity. |
From inside the book
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... Smells offended her, grit irritated her. How could they live, up there, in such coarse comforts, so unknowingly? She was alien. She was a changeling. She was of a finer breed. She could hear her father sucking on his pipe. Spittle ...
... Smells offended her, grit irritated her. How could they live, up there, in such coarse comforts, so unknowingly? She was alien. She was a changeling. She was of a finer breed. She could hear her father sucking on his pipe. Spittle ...
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... smells the deep thick primeval mud of the past. Bessie does not like mud. The Bawtrys had stuck in Hammervale for millennia, mother and daughter, through the long mitochondrial matriarchy. Already Bessie sensed this, and already she ...
... smells the deep thick primeval mud of the past. Bessie does not like mud. The Bawtrys had stuck in Hammervale for millennia, mother and daughter, through the long mitochondrial matriarchy. Already Bessie sensed this, and already she ...
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... smell so acute that an unpleasant odour could make her retch and gag and on occasions vomit. Bessie, as her mother complained with forced and grudging pride, was always being sick. These sensitive attributes may have seemed ill-suited ...
... smell so acute that an unpleasant odour could make her retch and gag and on occasions vomit. Bessie, as her mother complained with forced and grudging pride, was always being sick. These sensitive attributes may have seemed ill-suited ...
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... smell. Maybe words are always more beautiful than things, and reality but a pale shadow of the Word? 'Joy cometh in the morning.' Will it ever come? Bessie Bawtry rocked a little, with her short arms round her thin knees, and nodded in ...
... smell. Maybe words are always more beautiful than things, and reality but a pale shadow of the Word? 'Joy cometh in the morning.' Will it ever come? Bessie Bawtry rocked a little, with her short arms round her thin knees, and nodded in ...
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... the odds. A disagreeable smell of boiled meat issued mournfully from the blackened kitchen range. The Bawtrys, in these prewar years, did not go hungry. They did not eat well, but they ate a lot. Both Bert and Ellen were stout, as 13.
... the odds. A disagreeable smell of boiled meat issued mournfully from the blackened kitchen range. The Bawtrys, in these prewar years, did not go hungry. They did not eat well, but they ate a lot. Both Bert and Ellen were stout, as 13.
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Common terms and phrases
Auntie Dora babies Bert Bessie Barron Bessie Bawtry Bessie's boys Breasebor Breaseborough Cambridge Chrissie's coal Cotterhall dark daugh daughter dead death Donald Sinclair Dora's Dr Hawthorn earth Edith Sitwell Ellen Bawtry eyes Faro Gaulden Faro's father Fiona George Bellew Georgette Heyer Gertrude Wadsworth girl glass Hammervale happy Highcross Holderfield Jenny Pargiter Joe Barron knew listened live look Lyme Regis married Miss Heald mother never Nick Gaulden Nick's night Northam once peppered moth Peter Cudworth ring Robert and Chrissie Rose round Rowena says Faro Sebastian seemed sister sister Dora Slotton Road smell South Yorkshire Spanish flu stare Stella Steve Nieman story sure T. S. Eliot tell thing thought tried waiting waste watch woman women wonder young