Cloth Girl - Marilyn Heward Mills
Mathilda is a young fourteen year-old native schoolgirl, starting English lessons and excited about her future, when she is forced into a marriage as Second Wife to the illustrious lawyer Robert Bannerman, a native of the country who has been educated at university in England. Apart from having her prospects taken out of her hands, Mathilda, still a child, has to endure the jealousy and humiliation of the lawyer’s First Wife, the sophisticated and cruel Julie.
We also follow the fortunes of Audrey, the new wife of Alan Turton, an assistant to the Governor at the Colonial Office – in many respects also having her life brought to a standstill, finding it impossible to adjust to either the tedious lifestyle and behaviour expected of a Commissioner’s wife or the unbearable climate of the country.
Following the daily trials of each of these women, Marilyn Heward Mills makes Cloth Girl a completely accessible and riveting read – as gripping as any thriller, with clear, lucid, expressive prose. In doing so, she manages to skilfully capture the essential nature of the differing circumstances of all the people there - the divisions and inequalities between the British colonists and the natives, their prejudices and fears, their contrasting beliefs and customs. That she manages to do this with few direct allusions and an almost complete lack of dry historical background information, is a remarkable achievement. Her characters are completely alive and real, their little gestures of compliance and defiance in the face of the humiliations and failures they endure coming to personify the deep-rooted and irreconcilable differences in their respective cultures. Her all-encompassing viewpoint takes in a much wider perspective than the distant, aloofness and caricature that can often be found in Graham Greene’s depictions of these lands. The fact that Cloth Girl is the work of a first-time novelist is nothing less than astonishing.
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