Doomed by circumstances of birth

“Doomed by circumstances of birth” is the phrase Edwin Fairley’s grandfather uses to describe the recurring thwarting of love between Harte women and Fairley men. It gathers several generations of romantic conflict into a single inheritance: the phrase first seems to describe a fate imposed by class and circumstance, then becomes an appeal to let the pattern end with Paula and Jim Fairley.

Meaning and Generational Pattern

The phrase is not merely a description of one failed romance. As Jim explains to Emma Harte, his grandfather said that Harte women had held a fatal fascination for Fairley men, but that the couples had repeatedly been crossed in love. He connected Emma and Edwin’s denied relationship with the earlier thwarted love of Emma’s mother and Jim’s father. “Doomed by circumstances of birth” compresses those histories into a common predicament: the people involved may love one another, but their family positions and the conditions into which they are born obstruct their union.

The expression also changes meaning in the act of being passed down. Edwin’s grandfather asks Jim to tell Emma that this generation should have the happiness denied to the generations before it, and that she alone can finally join the families through marriage. What had sounded like a sentence of inherited misfortune thus becomes a call to interrupt it. Jim brings Emma a painted stone of her mother, which gives the family history a tangible form as well as a verbal one.

Emma and Edwin: Class as a Circumstance of Birth

The phrase’s clearest earlier embodiment is Emma’s relationship with Edwin. When Emma tells him she is going to have a baby, Edwin is shaken and recognizes that marriage would be the decent response. He considers eloping and imagines a future in which Emma might be presented differently to his family, but the prospect of his father’s anger and the loss of his own future as a barrister stops him. He sees Emma not only as the woman he loves but as a village girl and servant, and concludes that the gulf between the gentry and working class is too wide to cross.

Edwin’s silence makes that social boundary decisive. Emma reads his refusal to speak as a refusal to marry her; she will not go to a doctor, and she confronts him with the class difference he has allowed to govern his choice. Their separation is therefore not simply misfortune arriving from outside. Edwin’s fear of losing family support and ambition helps turn inherited class conditions into an immediate personal decision, with lasting consequences for both of them.

Birth, Registration, and Concealed Paternity

The expression’s concern with birth has a literal as well as a social dimension in Emma’s efforts to protect her daughter. Blackie O’Neill points out that the law requires Emma to give the father’s name when registering the birth in Leeds. Emma does not want to identify Edwin. Blackie proposes putting his own name on the certificate instead, reasoning that a named father would be preferable to “father unknown,” even though the document would still mark the child as illegitimate. He insists on accompanying Emma to the registrar and accepts responsibility for Edwina as her godfather.

Years later, Emma tells Joe Lowther plainly that Edwina is illegitimate but does not disclose the father’s identity. She repeats the account she had given Blackie, preserving the secret while being candid about the child’s status. Her disclosure allows Joe to accept her without knowing the truth about Edwin; the birth circumstances remain a private burden shaped by the same social and legal pressures the phrase evokes.

From Inherited Obstacle to Possible End

The phrase returns when Jim gives Emma his grandfather’s message. By then, Emma has relented and agreed to Paula and Jim’s relationship on her own. Jim tells her that the older man had asked him to urge her to let this generation find the happiness that had eluded their predecessors. The request makes Emma’s approval more than a personal change of heart: it becomes a chance to stop family history from dictating the next couple’s future.

The story’s use of the expression therefore holds fate and agency together. Birth and class have already shaped Emma and Edwin’s choices, and the concealed paternity of Edwina carries that history forward. Yet the phrase is finally voiced not as proof that the families must remain divided, but as the reason they should no longer be. Emma’s approval of Paula and Jim offers the possibility that the inherited pattern can end in marriage rather than repeat itself.