A review by tensy
Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

5.0

Mothering Sunday refers to an European custom of wealthy households where servants were given a day off to visit their families (or visit their "mother church".) This novella takes one such Sunday in 1924 and impeccably describes the events that transpire to change the life of one young servant named Jane Fairchild. This is the first book I have read by Swift and it has the same atmospheric effect as watching an episode of Downton Abbey. He packs so much about the life of this woman into its pages that you forget how short it actually is. The pacing is languid, yet fully develops the characters, the English setting and customs of the period. There are many passages I would love to quote, but here is one of my favorites:

Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.