I did really really try to like this book. I wanted to like it because it was about women and on the surface it was about relationships between women. There were no spinsters or lesbians. There were sisters (in Hanna's generation) and female friendships but these were left underdeveloped, background for the husband-wife dynamics which were pretty bleak.

Despite rape and DV, lack of sexual pleasure and lack of freedom/trust the author was so thoroughly committed to rehabilitating the heterosexual family institution that she made multiple excuses for the men centred mostly on mothers but also a Freudian passage where Anna speculates about whether she is "castrating" toward her husband. I did try to read that in it's context as the understanding of the time which she works through and leaves behind but she kept returning to it as she related to her dying parents. Other excuses for men were being too attractive, being a good provider, not understanding things, the wife being stupid, the wife being emotionally inaccessible/frigid and "yes they are flawed but we love them anyway" which seems to be the conclusion reached after all the meandering.

Do we? Not all of us do! The women keep talking themselves back into their marriages, back into their roles and there is a sense of fatalism like it needs to and must be that way, like there is some essentialist force, like that is the whole point of life-and-death. Everything else changes but what does not change is heterosexuality and birth. Careers are back-burner compared to that. There are artefacts. Men have cars and boats, women have jewellery and furtniture (made or provided by men).

I did try to see past all that, to see that as historical detail and see that there was something else there but if there was it was hidden by the insistant no matter what returning to heterosexuality. There was also a tendency to see the same archetypes (by gender but not necessarily blood) through the generations - Rickard is like Ragnar....etc....I guess maybe that's Jungian the archetype thing. It's sort of feminism but for me it falls short of saying anything meaningful and also if it's feminism then why are the women so uninterested in anything other than trying to rehabilitate their relationships with violet, neglectful or faithless men?

I just looked at the date, it is a very old book. In the 90s I think this was all more in context. I guess I sort of understand now. But...I'm not up for more.