First World War

The First World War is a decisive rupture in the Bailey family history and part of the novel’s wider account of how historical catastrophe persists in later generations. Its losses impoverish the Lincolnshire branch, while the Norfolk branch keeps much of the family wealth; the resulting division helps explain why Maud Bailey grows up without a strong sense of Christabel LaMotte as a family figure. Elsewhere, Blanche Glover’s reflections on independent women’s lives echo the war’s human cost and the unequal resources available to those left vulnerable.

The Bailey Family After the War

Maud explains that the Lincolnshire Baileys lost all their sons in the First World War except one, who was an invalid. The family consequently became impoverished, whereas the Norfolk Baileys retained a substantial share of the money. The divide was not merely geographic: the Norfolk and Lincolnshire branches no longer spoke to one another, leaving a family history fractured by bereavement and unequal economic survival.

That separation shaped Maud’s understanding of her ancestry. Sophie LaMotte had married a Lincolnshire Bailey, but Maud did not grow up thinking of Christabel as a poet in her family, even by marriage. In the Bailey world she knew, literary distinction carried little weight beside conspicuous achievements such as two Derby winners and an uncle’s record ascent of the Eiger. The war’s losses and the family’s estrangement thus form part of the background against which Maud later recovers a literary inheritance that her upbringing had largely obscured.

A Wider Measure of Social Vulnerability

The war is also invoked in Blanche Glover’s account of the possibilities available to independent women. Looking back on the shared ideal she and Christabel had tried to live out, Blanche writes of a life intended to be frugal, charitable, philosophical, artistic, and sustained by women’s company rather than dependence on men or outside help. She judges the experiment unsuccessful, attributing that failure both to a hostile world and to the women’s own limited resources and strength. Her appeal for stronger spirits to continue the work makes independence a fragile social project, not simply a matter of personal resolve.

Blanche’s insistence that independent women must expect more of themselves sits beside Maud’s description of the Lincolnshire Baileys’ impoverishment after losing their sons. The novel does not make the war the direct cause of Blanche’s circumstances, but places its family consequences within a larger pattern: bereavement and material insecurity can narrow the choices available to people already exposed to unequal social conditions.

Historical Memory and Family Identity

The First World War appears through later recollection rather than as a directly narrated battle. Its significance lies in what remains: a surviving invalid son, an impoverished branch, withheld family contact, and a descendant who initially knows little of the poet in her own ancestry. The war therefore functions as a break in both family continuity and the transmission of knowledge.

The novel’s wider history of concealed parentage and inheritance gives this break added resonance. When the family’s hidden relationships are eventually brought into view, the old division between Norfolk and Lincolnshire helps show how kinship can persist while family narratives split apart. The war does not explain every later silence, but its aftermath supplies a concrete historical wound behind the Bailey family’s estrangement and Maud’s incomplete inheritance of the past.