The painter's daughters

The painter of the title is the eighteenth-century British master Thomas Gainsborough, and the focus is on his daughters, Mary (Molly) and Margaret (Peggy). Early on, Peggy realizes there is an oddness to her older sister that must be hidden. While Gainsborough finds coin but little joy in his portraits of rich sitters, the girls' fretful, harried mother attempts to keep body and soul together and mold them into marriageable material. Her pretensions, based on a family secret, seem far above their supposed station. In a parallel narrative set a generation earlier, barmaid Meg has a chance meeting with the prince of Wales that will have far-reaching consequences. Howes' characters are all well-realized, a fond but preoccupied father in Thomas, a mother whose love for her daughters is underpinned by frustration and apprehension. The narrative glue is the complicated relationship between Molly and Peggy, a bond dominated by the specter of mental illness and what its discovery could do to the family's social standing and livelihood. Howes' debut is a work of absorbing biographical fiction exploring love, self-sacrifice, and codependency.

Psychotherapist and sketch comedy writer Howes (The Ladies) portrays sisterhood, family secrets, and mental illness in her intricate and vibrant debut. The novel takes place in late-18th-century Ipswich, England, where as young girls, Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are given free rein by their emotionally absent painter father and corralled by their society-conscious mother. Molly's bouts of sleepwalking, blackouts, and memory loss have been increasing in frequency, despite Peggy's attempts to help her sister in an era when mental illness was viewed as witchcraft and loved ones were shipped to asylums. Terrified of separation, Peggy shoulders the burden of her sister's episodes alone, a responsibility that becomes even heavier when the girls are 12 and 13 and the family moves to Bath, where they must make a good impression so their father can bring in customers for portraits. The novel is rife with secrets--including a past the sisters' mother refuses to speak about, forbidden lovers, and the mysterious interwoven story of an innkeeper's daughter and her abusive father--but the Gainsboroughs persevere through illness and betrayal. Though a rushed ending feels out of sync with the carefully laid details of the sisters' lives, Howes excels in her depiction of truth and rumors. Readers will want to linger in this singular world. Agent: Andrianna Yeatts, CAA. (Feb.)

The women in 18th-century British painter Thomas Gainsborough's family are the subject of this portrait in words. As promised by the title, Howes delivers an immersive dive into the lives of Gainsborough's daughters but also provides an intriguing backstory about his wife's purported ancestry. The Gainsborough girls--Molly the elder and Peggy a bit younger--enjoy a fairly feral and unrestrained early childhood in Suffolk, despite their mother's attempts to rein them in. Molly shows signs of a troubling tendency toward spells of odd behavior and confusion, which continue, and worsen, after the family relocates to the more fashionable city of Bath, a move undertaken to expose the girls (who sometimes model for their father) to a more civilized way of life and advance Gainsborough's career as a portrait artist. Terrified that she and Molly will be separated and that Molly's condition will expose her to ridicule and, worse, institutionalization in a barbaric "Bedlam," Peggy develops a system of coping mechanisms and evasive tactics in an attempt to keep them together. Running parallel to the girls' story is the unfolding saga of the earlier life of Meg, a young Englishwoman from an impoverished background with a history of familial violence and loss. Meg's secret relationship with the visiting Frederick of Hanover (then Prince of Wales) leads her to take bold steps to secure her future and that of their secretly conceived child. The struggle between genetics and secrecy is just one of the themes explored by Howes in this subtle exploration of love, duty, and resentment. The author's note details her research into Gainsborough and his circle, illuminating which parts of the narrative are grounded in fact and which are imaginative embellishment. A thoughtful view of the real lives behind the pretty pictures. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.