….and page 3 of the hardcover. Here’s further exposition of Superego Sophie, her stepmother Fanny, and her sisters Lettie and Martha:
Since Fanny was always busy in the shop, Sophie was the one who looked after the younger two. There was a certain amount of screaming and hair-pulling between those younger two….
Then Sophie would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. She was very deft with her needle. As time went on, she made clothes for her sisters too. There was one deep rose outfit she made for Lettie, the May Day before this story really starts, which Fanny said looked as if it had come from the most expensive shop in Kingsbury.
With the “deep rose outfit” we have our first example of the novel’s thematic color scheme.
Sophie is the sort of child parental-types worry least about; she’s doesn’t throw wing-dings like her sisters, with whom she has a calming way; she has a cool head, a good mind, and a terrific work ethic. Although in her way she is as strong-minded as Lettie and Martha, she is at the same time calmer and more mature. She reads, she studies, she gets good grades. Plus she’s supercompetent. Children like this must be a pleasure to raise; they’re so much less work than the more active, ebullient ones.
Then, one day, Mr. Hatter drops dead. We don’t know what happens, only that the girls lose their father just as Sophie is about to complete the Ingarian — or Inglish — equivalent of high school, and Martha and Lettie are in their freshman and junior years. He must have been a good man, to have raised three spirited, intelligent, strong-minded young women. But he leaves them nothing. The hat shop is on the ropes.
We’re told Mr. Hatter ran up heavy debts paying his daughters’ tuition at “the best school in town.” With his death his family goes from prosperity to destitution overnight. The girls’ comfortable lives are permanently disrupted, and the fairy-tale necessity of “seeking their fortunes” is no longer off in some vague future, but urgent and immediate.
All this just as the country has once again come under siege by the Witch of the Waste, Sophie’s home town is terrorized by the ominous castle-that-moves in the hills above it, and Wizard Howl, so they say, has taken a fancy to eating the heart — or is it sucking the soul? — of any young woman who is foolish enough to venture out alone.
I do wonder why the Hatters’ business failed so quickly when Mr. Hatter died? Business owners die every day and, unless it is a one-man business (which the hat shop was not), or he played an irreplaceable role in the business (the ONLY one who could design hats, for example), someone, usually a close relative or trusted employee, carries on.
They might succeed or not in the long run due to their business acumen, or lack thereof, but it does seem odd that the business wouldn’t carry on for a time at least. In fact, it does, now I think of it — Sophie is still sewing hats as fast as she can, long into the night, etc.
Well, it is fiction after all, and darn good, too. I am perhaps over-obsessed with analyzing every circumstance for plausibility and continuity with the rest of the work.
Jones may be, in part anyway, evoking the Dickens/Austen era when a family’s fate, particularly its economic fate, was pretty much invested in the father. Recall how the Dashwoods were turned out in Sense and Sensibility and how the same prospect loomed in Pride and Prejudice, while Dickens was out working in a blacking factory at age 12 because his father was thrown in debtor’s prison.
Ingary seems a much more benign realm in which widows are not turned out and women can get schooling and learn trades to support themselves. However, Jones is working with a group of characters about whom nothing is as it first appears. Mr. Hatter and his shop appeared prosperous, even to his wife. On his death we learn that it was riddled with debt. The business did not fail, however; Fanny downsized, then put Sophie to work making hats. Sophie’s unexpected gifts became the battery that kept the shop going. Gifted people often find themselves powering other people’s projects and ambitions…
I find this statement a bit chilling: “Gifted people often find themselves powering other people’s projects and ambitions…”
because I have seen it happen, and not in a pleasant way. I actually came back looking for that quote; that’s how well it stuck in my head. Thank you for validating my own observations.