“One of the trees had fallen in the storm. She could see its roots reaching up toward the sky like long, grasping fingers. It had left a gap, through which Jane glimpsed a house, pale purple, very old, with turrets and elaborate trim painted green in some spots and blue in others. One upstairs shutter dangled precariously. The window beside it had been smashed. A white curtain billowed out from within. The woman was right. The house was creepy. Jane had the strongest urge to go there and explore.”

The Prologue introduces the house as pivotal in women’s history in Awadapquit. Jane’s discovery of the house (early in the novel) establishes its importance. The final sentences of this passage show what makes Jane different: The woman on the boat call the house “creepy,” and Jane agrees, but this only makes her more interested in it, which reveals the seeds of her interest in history.

“Her son’s tiny room was behind a hidden door, which, when closed, blended completely into the wall—no trim, no doorknob. They had several other bedrooms, far more spacious, but Benjamin insisted on that one. He liked the coziness, she thought. And the novelty.”

The hidden room is a motif throughout the novel, and it first appears through Benjamin’s discovery of it. As generations of people discover the room, its meaning deepens, thematically connecting it to The Potential Subjectivity of Historical Accounts. Genevieve’s lack of understanding about the room’s attraction highlights her lack of connection to the history of the house. Her disinterest and insensitivity lead to her digging up the cemetery.

“Jane had thought in that moment that maybe she had killed her desire to drink once and for all, but apparently not. Right now, she wanted to walk over to those guys in the corner and down the contents of all three of their cups before they could say a word.”

Although Jane likes to believe that her drinking is casual, under pressure she reveals a need that she doesn’t want to recognize. She experiences brief moments of clarity throughout the novel but repeatedly refuses to acknowledge them. Her character arc involves acknowledging an alcohol use disorder and committing to recovery.

“Only fifty percent of female lobsters are capable of producing eggs, her voice cheery, upbeat. We mark those ones and throw them back. They’re too valuable to eat. The female lobsters that aren’t capable of reproducing are the ones that end up on your dinner plate. They serve no other purpose.

How did the passengers react to that? She didn’t remember now. Filtered through the lens of a childless, recently separated thirty-nine-year-old woman, it felt aggressive. Mean. It was a wonder no one had ever told her to go fuck herself.”

Jane reflects on the speech she gave while working on lobster boat tours as a teen. As a woman who both fears and desires having children, her glib speech reads differently now. However, her younger self merely reflected society’s attitudes toward women and their place in the world, connecting to the theme of Women’s Purpose in the Family and Community.

“The house contained so much of her mother and grandmother, their overlapping lives evident in her grandmother’s white Pyrex bowls and her mother’s Tupperware; her grandmother’s china tea set mixed in with her mother’s coffee mugs on the shelf; her grandmother’s red plastic rosary beads in the junk drawer, alongside her mother’s pink plastic cigarette lighters.”

Jane offers a concrete example of the differences between her mother and grandmother. The various items from their lives develop their characters, while their juxtaposition shows the difference between the generations (for example, in Pyrex versus Tupperware or tea set versus coffee mugs). In addition, this description thematically connects to The Potential Subjectivity of Historical Accounts because it shows how concrete objects contribute to historical representation.

“She wasn’t good at being comforted by someone else. For most of her life, she had done that for herself. She knew she was safe with him, but could never quite manage to flip the switch on the instinct that told her David would harm her if she wasn’t careful.”

Jane’s struggles with personal connection in her relationships are clearest in her interactions with David. Her difficulty with trust stems from her relationship with her mother, whom she couldn’t trust not to hurt her when she was vulnerable. This is just one way that The Generational Aspect of Addiction and the Importance of Accountability thematically manifests in Jane’s life and relationships.

“The women of Beacon Hill had an outsize presence at the archives, especially those who lived there in the second half of the nineteenth century. Louisa May Alcott. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sarah Orne Jewett. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman doctor in America, who started her practice to provide medical care to freed slaves after the Civil War”

Jane addresses the underrepresentation of women of color in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, giving an example of a Black woman whose contributions to medicine and society the archives highlight: Rebecca Lee Crumpler. The three white women she mentions are prominent literary figures: Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women (1868) and Eight Cousins (1874); Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851); and Sarah Orne Jewett, who wrote A White Heron (1886) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). However, Jane automatically feels the need to emphasize Crumpler’s importance, noting that despite her considerable contributions, she isn’t as well-known as the others.

“Jane’s family had no such stories. When she asked her mother about previous generations, her mother said, without curiosity, ‘We don’t have any family.’

‘Everyone has family,’ Jane said. […]

She held this against her mother. Jane felt sure her grandmother would have told her all the things she wanted to know. Not only that, but she would have understood why Jane wanted to know them. About Jane’s grandfather, her own father, Jane’s mother said she remembered very little.”

Jane’s limited knowledge about both her mother and her grandmother is on full display here. She didn’t understand her mother’s sensitivity on the topic of family but “held it against her” nonetheless. The novel challenges Jane’s assumptions about both women as she learns truths about her grandmother that force her to reconsider both women.

“‘She said Grandma would bring this married guy around and sometimes she would make Mom go to his house and sit there while they were in the other room. A couple times Granda didn’t even come home and Mom was here all by herself, terrified. She had just lost her father and been moved to a place where she didn’t know anyone.’

‘That didn’t happen,’ Jane said, indignant.”

Holly knows more about their family history than Jane does because Holly had a closer relationship with Shirley. This information rocks Jane’s understanding of her mother and her idealization of her grandmother. Jane reacts automatically with denial, though by doing so she’s obliquely accusing her sister of lying. This exchange and the revelations that it spurs for Jane thematically highlight The Generational Aspect of Addiction and the Importance of Accountability.

“It was entirely possible [Ethel] had made it up and, with the passage of time, her version of events had become the one trusted and shared by people like Abe Adams.”

Thematically, this quote explores The Potential Subjectivity of Historical Accounts through Jane’s thoughts as she reflects on what she knows about Archibald Pembroke from Ethel Troy’s local history book. She recognizes that Ethel’s version may have become the “truth” simply because it was the one that was written down. In this way, story becomes history.

“Marilyn said she didn’t believe in [reincarnation] as others defined it, but that she had lived five distinct lives in the span of her one lifetime. This was something she had often thought, but never uttered out loud until then.”

Marilyn considers the different stages of her life as different lives because each was so distinct from the next. Her story probes the theme of Women’s Purpose in the Family and Community as she struggles to balance her role as a wife and mother, who loves her daughter, with her practice and success as an artist.

“Daisy asked the woman if she knew anything about Sister Eliza. She was so well informed about Samuel, after all. But the woman said no.”

The novel subtly highlights The Potential Subjectivity of Historical Accounts as a theme: While the woman Daisy questioned knew the details of Samuel Littleton’s life, she knew nothing about Sister Eliza, even though Eliza’s story intertwined with the house more than Samuel’s did. Marilyn and Daisy’s experiences echo Jane’s thoughts about how undocumented stories are lost.

“Mothers were supposed to rise early, before their children. To greet them with a smile and a kiss, to have breakfast waiting. But Marilyn was often working when Daisy woke up, and had to fight off a sense of irritation at being interrupted. Marilyn would try to convince her, or bribe her with cookies, to play with her dolls or look at a book alone for thirty minutes, to give herself more time. A real mother would have gone back to Maine that first night, after that strange phone call. Returned home to her child. But Marilyn didn’t do that. Marilyn stayed.”

Throughout her life, Marilyn struggled with society’s expectations of women, thematically emphasizing Women’s Purpose in the Family and Community. This struggle reached a climax after Daisy’s birth, which coincided with an exciting growth period for Marilyn as an artist. Marilyn’s clear understanding of the expectations that she wasn’t fulfilling is apparent in the first two sentences, which list everything a mother “should” be. Following that is a litany of Marilyn’s actual feelings, which starkly juxtapose society’s expectations, leading even Marilyn to believe that she wasn’t a “good” mother.

“Jane thought of the baskets she had seen at the exhibit in Portland a few days earlier. Created by people who each came from a long line of basket-makers, intent on preserving their traditions. This house, as designed by Genevieve, didn’t feel like a satisfying final destination for such a creation.”

Jane thinks about the basket Genevieve bought from unscrupulous dealer Thomas Crosby. Even though she doesn’t know the basket’s story, she senses that its history is deep, and her recent visit to the Portland exhibit placed lost Indigenous history at the forefront of her mind. She contrasts the deeply authentic basket with the modern, minimal, anonymous home that Genevieve created by stripping the house of its history.

“Motherhood is the most radical act in the world, and we’ve turned it into tapioca pudding. What’s more toothless, more invisible in this culture, than a mother?”

At Camp Mira, Jane attends a seminar on “the feminist history of Spiritualism” (241), and it reminds her of the power of motherhood. She struggles with the idea of motherhood, which she simultaneously desires and is terrified of. She envies Allison and Genevieve’s experience of motherhood and is ashamed that she can’t overcome her fear. By reframing motherhood as “radical,” the lecturer gives Jane a different way to consider motherhood that contrasts with its usual portrayal.

“Jane wondered why she had found the academic convincing while this struck her as truly nuts. Were they really telling such different stories? Was she programmed to believe a man with the title of doctor and disbelieve a woman with the title of medium? Yes. Of course she was.”

During her stay at Camp Mira, Jane vacillates between interest and skepticism. She’s an academic, so she automatically takes the male doctor’s word, but so would society in general. In addition, this reflection shows that Jane is self-aware in this context: She interrogates her own culturally engineered biases even though doing so reveals an uncomfortable truth about herself.

“Life was painfully, unimaginably brief. In some strange way, the thought filled Jane with courage. It made her want to act. The situation with David was bad, but at least they were both alive and breathing. So many people on this boat couldn’t say as much about the ones they loved most.”

Jane is surprised at how many people visited Camp Mira in search of contact with a lost loved one to alleviate their grief. The experience puts life in perspective for Jane, and she reflects on what she has realized. This is part of Jane’s journey toward recovery: Realizing that life is short gives her motivation to change.

“‘Mom used to say it was funny that you were so embarrassed by what she did for work, considering it was the reason you ended up with the job you did,’ Holly said. ‘You’re in the family business too when you think about it.’”

Holly was always closer with their mother. As Clementine puts it, they were “two peas in a pod” (79). Jane always felt superior to them because she considered their work as just buying and reselling junk. However, Holly points out the similarities between what they do, connecting Jane’s career with her early exposure to artifacts through her mother’s business.

“A sense I had long before I could put it into words: that men were a danger to women. That women must find or build spaces of our own in order to be safe. The Shakers promised respite. Stability. Peace. Nonjudgment. Standing there in a hat shop in Portland, I felt intensely proud of the Shakers, as if they were still mine to be proud of. I thought of the true kindness I had known all my life.”

Upon leaving Sabbathday Lake, Eliza confronted a different world, in which it quickly became clear that women were in “danger” daily. Because she was taken to the Shaker community when she was only three, she had no other experience. However, she now understood what she couldn’t see about Shaker life earlier: that although it was rigid, the people were kind to one another.

“He wasn’t a bad man. He loved Hannah, that was clear. But he was out of his depth. He wished her to be happy. He wished her to be the girl she was when they first met. He may as well have wished her to be a deer traipsing through the woods, so grotesque and impossible was his request.”

As Eliza noted, Samuel clearly loved Hannah. However, he wanted her to remain the same rather than changing or developing while he was gone. He had a specific idea of Women’s Purpose in the Family and Community, and Hannah couldn’t fulfill his expectations while she was grieving.

“Not a single person aboard survived. The ship’s officers and six of its sailors were local boys. Ten others were foreigners, picked up in Italian and Spanish ports. There was no one to identify them when their bodies washed ashore. No list of their names. A woman had been on the ship as well, her provenance completely unaccounted for. She and the anonymous sailors were buried on a hill near the beach, a simple wooden cross to commemorate them all.”

Thematically, this passage illustrates Jane’s point about The Potential Subjectivity of Historical Accounts: The stories of those who weren’t local and whose names weren’t known were lost. The community couldn’t commemorate their deaths without their names, so they were buried in an anonymous grave. The wooden cross that marks the grave will disintegrate, unlike a gravestone, and then all memory of the event will be lost as well.

“‘I’m embarrassed,’ [Jane] said. ‘Did I do anything exceptionally stupid? Last night is a blur.’

‘Embarrassed? Nah,’ Abe said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Welcome to the club.’

Jane wished she were that person he saw, that good girl, for whom such behavior was an anomaly. She did not need to be welcomed to the club. She was president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer.”

In addition to the shame she feels about drinking the night before, Jane must deal with the ramifications of her blackout. Abe has never known her in this way and thinks such drinking is unusual for her. She reflects on how wide the gap is between how he sees her and how she sees herself: While he doesn’t even think she’s a member of the “club,” she feels as if she could be running it.

“As the car reached the center of town, Jane drove by the Saint Aspinquid. All the lights were on inside. The warm glow of the inn depressed her. Since high school, Jane had envied what came naturally to Allison. A family made up of people who loved one another, and actually enjoyed being together.

Next came the inevitable guilt for feeling this way. The great good fortune of being loved by Allison and her family was something Jane hadn’t earned.”

Jane consistently compares herself to Allison, her family to Allison’s, and Shirley to Allison’s mother Betty. Although she loves Allison’s family, she feels both envy and anger about what she sees as coming “naturally”: She doesn’t recognize that Allison’s life presents its own challenges. In addition, the final sentence reinforces The Generational Aspect of Addiction and the Importance of Accountability as a theme: Jane feels shame and, as a result, doesn’t think she has “earned” the right to be loved.