They Were Sisters

Cracks opens with great skill and sensitivity the inner workings of an ordinary middle-class family... Whipple is not particularly interested in metaphor. Her writing is understated, unshowy, driven less by pyrotechnics than by clarity and the close art of looking. Her books about middle-class women, marriage, children, love, money and betrayal flow with an ease that belies the acuteness of their psychological insight. Without apparently trying, she cracks open the human heart... a page-turner of the most satisfying kind. This is in part down to its heartbreakingly clear-eyed study of domestic abuse, which, at a time when a wife had almost no chance of escaping a bad marriage and children were at the mercy of their fathers, was a trap almost impossible to spring. But although the book has its share of harrowing moments, they do not entirely explain its compulsive power. That is down to Whipple’s ability to summon with irresistible exactness a world as vivid as one’s own. You care so desperately about everyone that you absolutely have to know what happens to them. I was reminded of reading as a child, when immersion in a story was a full body experience, one’s relationship with the characters so urgent and unconditional that setting them aside even temporarily induced a wrenching kind of jet lag... 'They Were Sisters' is a time machine to take you away from 2025, and, with that, Whipple makes all our lives just a little less difficult.

It is the most extraordinary and brilliantly subtle but moving look at three sisters, and the interplay between them as they grow into adulthood. ‘They Were Sisters’ is the kind of book that doesn’t get published much anymore, because it doesn’t seem very high concept or thrilling. But it’s such a wonderful character study – and for women who are sisters, as I am, it’s got a particular resonance.

If you enjoy a family drama this 1943 novel is for you!… One of my favourite books of the year, Whipple is a revelation. It’s thrilling when you discover an author whose writing is like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Her work is electrifyingly sensitive & although she writes ‘kitchen sink drama’ her skill at characterisation & realism transforms the mundane into something incredibly powerful and emotive. Please get this book!

‘They Were Sisters’ is a domestic emotional drama centring on middle-class life in the 1930s. The afterword by Celia Brayfield really hit the nail on the head when she commented on the mastery of middleness. Undramatic, unsensational, and yet Dorothy Whipple so clearly evokes, and engenders acute emotional turbulence. There were points in all sections of the novel where I expected someone to hit someone, a hint of insidiousness to be brought to conclusion, to sexual assault, or romance to lead to total redemption. But nothing is so extreme in Whipple. She can leave things. Loose ends abound. Usually authors aren’t very good at just leaving (un)well alone. But it is glorious.The strength of the emotional drama lies in Whipple’s skill for inciting empathy for all her characters. Different, faulted and frustrating, there is empathy for every sister, every one of their children, every husband, every servant.