Relations

In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experience of being a daughter and a sister, about the intensities of family life and the illuminations that come from the last days and death of parents. Relations offers a portrait of a record-keeping, middle-class kinship, beginning with her parents’ long marriage, its mysteries and incompatibilities. Here are the tensions of belonging and yet not belonging to an English middle-class at once hospitable to difference and internally divided. More than two hundred years of English history are present in these portraits, which show the gradual emancipation of women, the effects of empire on family life and the importance to it of religion, education and money. It is the story of an evolution, of a move out of trade towards public service and the professions, and towards the dramas and family romance of recent times.