Mothering Sunday

Jane, now in her eighties, describes how she went to Beechwood in 1917, aged 16, to work as a maid for the Nivens after being raised in an orphanage. As a novice maid, Jane was cheap, which suited the Nivens due to the constraints the war placed on the family budget. Being a maid was helpful for an aspiring writer like Jane because it “made [her] an occupational observer of life, it put [her] on the outside looking in” (99). Jane also recalls meeting Milly for the first time and how Milly asked her if she was an “orchid,” confusing the word with “orphan.” Milly became a mother figure to Jane, but in 1924 she was committed to a home for people with mental illnesses. She never returned, but Jane based one of the characters in her novel Tell Me Again on Milly.

Jane tells the story of how in Autumn of 1924 she went to work as an assistant in an Oxford bookshop. She got on well with the customers due to her knowledge of books and met professors and students at the university: “[S]he began to consort, to go out, even to go to bed with some of them” (113).