Dorothy Whipple and Edith Stein: on motherhood, home, and infertility

And why you must add 'They Were Sisters' to the top of your reading list

Today's book is Dorothy Whipple’s They Were Sisters (1943), which I have not been able to stop recommending since I read it earlier this year. Though it’s a doorstopper coming in at just under 450 pages, I blazed right through its gripping tale in a few days.

Dorothy Whipple, a once bestselling but now largely forgotten twentieth-century author, wrote domestic dramas that have been happily preserved from biblio-oblivion by Persephone Books. What makes her novels such mesmerizing page-turners and what makes them worthy of critical attention is their moral weight and psychological realism. These are not works of simple melodrama. With unadorned prose Whipple tells stories that feel lifted straight from life. Her characters are ordinary people faced with ordinary choices that have consequences ranging from the liberating to the damning.

In They Were Sisters, three sisters choose to marry three very different men and the fallout rocks two generations. Impressionable Charlotte marries a cruel narcissist, Geoffrey. Beautiful Vera marries Brian, one of the many men in her thrall, whom she soon becomes bored with. The eldest, ever-dependable Lucy makes a fortunate match and finds quiet joy with William.

The stakes of marriage only compound when children come along, and the children that come of the sisters’ marriages are dealt a difficult hand. Charlotte has three children who learn early on that they must tread lightly around their father and that their mother is incapable of protecting them or herself from his abuse. Vera has two daughters who become hardened by their mother's emotional neglect and are consequently a disappointment to their father.

Lucy and William do not have children, and the pain of their infertility is spoken of frankly throughout the novel. But Lucy is at the heart of this story. She is continually associated with images of light, of safe harbor, of life-giving gardens, and she is more a mother-figure than either of her sisters.

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Encountering the character of Lucy put me in the mind of the writings of another childless but maternal woman, the twentieth-century philosopher and martyr, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, more popularly known as Edith Stein.

There are two cultural narratives surrounding motherhood that I repeatedly hear. The first is that a woman’s life is incomplete without children, and the second is that motherhood is an optional state, and indeed, a lamentable one for many women. Either way of framing motherhood is out of tune with St. Edith Stein (and orthodox Christian thought through the ages). Instead this dichotomy betrays what a two-dimensional and contracted vision of motherhood we possess.

Radically to the modern mind, Stein believed all women are meant to be mothers, while also maintaining that motherhood does not always entail physically begetting or raising children. Stein described a woman’s soul as “fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold.”¹ The mature woman is a mother to those whom providence puts in her way whether they be her own children or godchildren or nieces and nephews or students or patients or employees and so on. In They Were Sisters, Stein’s vision is embodied strikingly through Lucy and by dark contrast through Charlotte and Vera.

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Near the beginning of the novel, Vera and Charlotte come to visit Lucy. Charlotte brings her daughter, Judith, along with her, and we see much of this visit through six-year-old Judith's experience.

Judith is excited at the rare prospect of sharing a room with her mother, but her Aunt Vera wants to spend time with Charlotte and robs her niece of this joy. Children are “so at the mercy of other people, so at the mercy their parents”², Lucy observes after Charlotte irritably dismisses Judith who is fearful of sleeping alone. Late into the night, Lucy is dismayed to find that Judith has been unable to fall asleep and she lets her niece sleep in her own bed with her.

Poor little girl, thought Lucy remorsefully, what she must have gone through lying awake while we all went comfortably off to sleep. Why does no one ever remember what it means to be a child? She was afraid of the dark, and too brave to say so. Well, it shan’t happen again. Not in this house, anyway.

Judith’s early experience of her aunt’s kindness proves to be critically formative. Lucy gives Judith a gift she receives from no one else: a “feeling of confidence and security.” In her aunt’s house, she finds a shelter where her soul may unfold.

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Home is a preoccupation in this novel and it’s something Stein touches on in her own writing on femininity. Stein writes that woman’s natural “concern for the right development of the beings surrounding her involves the creation of an ambience, of order and beauty conducive to their development.”

Such a concern is innate to Lucy, whose home is described as full of “simplicity and beauty”. She finds pleasure in down-to-earth activities like tending to her hens and her garden. Though the villagers once regarded Lucy and William distantly as newcomers to the neighborhood, they soon adopt “the habit of coming to Lucy for help.” Lucy possesses the feminine attitude that Stein says “naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole”.

On returning home from her visit to Lucy’s, Charlotte is struck by the contrast between Lucy’s house and her own: “It was a man’s house. She had given in to Geoffrey in everything, even in the furnishing of the house, and she skimmed over the intimation again that there was something hotel-like in Geoffrey’s taste.”

Stein writes that man can only fulfil his corresponding vocation of fatherhood by cultivating humility. If he doesn’t, then “man’s non serviam before God brings about in its turn his perverted relationship to all creatures.” This perversion is manifested through a “degenerate desire for the possession of things through violence, a desire which falsifies, distorts and destroys.”

Geoffrey is animated by this kind of degenerate masculinity. Vera caustically says of her brother-in-law: “I wish he’d die…But that kind never does. They only destroy those who have to live with them.” Geoffrey refuses to bend his will to any other person, certainly not his wife and much less God. Aside from the furnishings, he controls the use of the rooms in the house often locking Charlotte out of the morning room and leaving her “to feel lost in her own home.” As Judith grows older, she unhappily observes: “Everyone is alone in this house.”

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Vera’s home is little better than Charlotte’s. If Charlotte’s household reflects how she’s been dominated by Geoffrey, Vera’s reflects the chaos in her soul. It’s interesting to contrast Vera’s inner life to Stein’s description of the “ideal image of the gestalt of the feminine soul”:

The soul of a woman must…be expansive and open to all human beings; it must be quiet so that no small weak flame will be extinguished by stormy winds; warm so as not to benumb fragile buds; clear, so that no vermin will settle in dark corners and recesses; self-contained, so that no invasions from without can imperil the inner life; empty of itself, in order that extraneous life may have room in it; finally, mistress of itself and also of its body, so that the entire person is readily at the disposal of every call.

Vera embodies the opposite of all these qualities. She finds her value externally from her admirers. She fills her house with parties and distractions. She extends kindness to her family when it suits her and otherwise acts coldly towards them. She is what Stein calls one of those “superficial and unstable women who chase after pleasure to fill their inner void.” But no pleasure fulfils Vera whom Whipple likens to “an exiled queen living in company that was not quite good enough.”

Vera’s house is also compared to a hotel, not because of any impersonal furnishings, but because it is run with careless prodigality and constantly overwhelmed by guests and the ringing of the telephone. Vera may outwardly seem to have power over the men in her life, but she is just as lonely, lost, and confused as Charlotte. She may be like an exiled queen, “yet”, Whipple writes, “she did not know where her kingdom was.”

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Stein writes that “the most essential factor in the formation of pure womanhood must be growing up near a woman who embodies it,” and of all her siblings and cousins, Judith spends the most time with Aunt Lucy.

As a teenager, she is sent to live for a time with her Aunt Vera. There Judith is, in her turn, able to the give the same security to her cousin, Sarah, whose future, like her mother's and Aunt Charlotte’s, threatens to follow a familiar path into confusion and pain. Under Judith’s influence “life [begins] to flow in Sarah, and in the house as well.” At one point in the novel, Lucy comments that “moral failure or spiritual failure…makes such a vicious circle”, but the opposite is true as well.

Unfortunately, not every character is receptive to this formative love or even has the opportunity to experience it. Out of their siblings, Judith’s older sister Margaret spends the most time with their father, and Whipple sums up the result of Geoffrey’s influence in this devastating line: “Her one desire was to make herself into a sophisticated young woman who didn't feel anything.”

Lucy is often kept separated from her sisters, nieces, and nephew, and she painfully learns the limitations of a sister and aunt’s love in protecting these “precious…imperilled creatures.” However, Lucy is at peace with herself and with God. Later in their lives, Vera is taken aback by the difference between Lucy and herself: “Why should she, so much better-looking, with much more money, with two children, have missed happiness and Lucy found it.”

In They Were Sisters, Whipple presents a relentlessly realistic picture of human nature, and in the end, many characters face an uncertain future. However, there is hope for some of the sisters’ children when they return to their Aunt Lucy who has always been, in so many ways, their real mother:

“Her sisters had been like two fair ships with no hand on the wheel…Lucy, grieving that she had not been able to help or save them, never thought—she had no idea—that she herself had been the beacon to bring their children to harbour.”

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Femininity is too often meaninglessly associated with superficial, performative trends, but St. Edith Stein’s rich thought stresses the spiritual reality that biology physically expresses—woman is created for motherhood. All women. Even those who will never have their own children. And the three sisters in Dorothy Whipple’s novel vividly enact what womanhood—whether malformed or fully realized—looks like.

You should read Dorothy Whipple. You should read St. Edith Stein. Both were women without children who understood with intense insight what it means to be a mother.

St. Edith Stein holding her cousin’s son, 1921

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1. Edith Stein, Essays on Woman, (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996).

2. Dorothy Whipple, They Were Sisters, (London: Persephone Books).