Blurb:
"Anti-war and anti-patriarchy without ever saying so - a bravura performance of effortless elegance"
- Irish Echo in Australia
In 1913, Irish emigrée Eva Downey receives a bequest from an elderly suffragette to attend a finishing school. There she finds friendship and, eventually, love. But when war looms and he refuses to enlist, Eva is under family and social pressure to give the man she loves a white feather of cowardice. The decision she eventually makes will have lasting consequences for her and everyone around her.
Journey with Eva as she battles through a hostile social order and endeavours to resist it at every turn.
Eva Downey – The Main Character of White Feathers
Eva Downey is indisputably the main character of the book, which centres around her trials. She is rarely off the page, but when she is, her presence lingers. Her narrative is in third person, which reflects her sometimes diffident and cautious nature. At the beginning of the book, she is seventeen years old, taking the train to The Links finishing school in Eastbourne after being bequeathed a legacy by an old suffragette. This was after she wrote an article about the time she sneaked out with the suffragettes to avoid the 1911 census. When this is discovered, her family are enraged, but Eva is obdurate. “Obdurate” would be a good word to describe her in general!
Eva’s father is Roy Downey, an Irish accountant in London, and his late wife Angela, but does not get on with his second wife, Catherine, the mother of her stepsister Grace and a former maid in the household. Catherine’s extreme class insecurity at this sudden social elevation narrows her focus into investing in Grace, and cutting out Eva and her older sister, Imelda. Catherine has a fixed notion of marrying Eva off to a friend in Ireland, even though Eva has no interest, and is quite nasty to him at one stage.
But Eva’s attachments to others are deep and real. She is very protective of Imelda, who suffers from tuberculosis, and is firm friends with Sybil, an aristocrat fellow-student she meets in her finishing school, The Links. Once you have Eva’s loyalty, you have it for life. She is not one to follow the current and blindly adhere to standards just because everyone says so. To put it in the words of Timothy Snyder, she is not the type to “obey in advance”.
Her attachment to Christopher is very slow and gradual, but it is the deepest of all her passions. He recognises something in her, that feeling of not-belonging, and it ignites enormous emotion in her. Building that in the novel was a very organic process, mostly leaning on dialogue and just natural chemistry. Her deep loyalty to him is challenged when he makes the ethical decision not to enlist for the war, and the choices her family force her to make damage her spirit.
Eva’s conflict with her family of origin is at the root of her experiences. Belonging to an Irish immigrant culture, she must cope with endless interfering and meddling from a broad network of relatives keeping an eye on her. It’s claustrophobic and she does everything in her power to escape their values and judgements. Her Irishness is something she has been socially programmed to suppress, but it emerges at the most inconvenient of moments!
Another thing about Eva which might seem trivial but actually is important is that she is a bit overweight. This aspect of her appearance is not something she is bothered about and she is content with how she presents herself. This is quietly radical, and I love that about her.
Susan Lanigan
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