BPS Review : The Painter's Daughter, Emily Howell ( May 2025)

At the risk of me falling into my predictable moans, this at first appears to be another of those ‘ dammed by faint praise’ contemporary novels which follow a formula = historical context, not too long, multiple perspectives, realism, predictable character arcs, etc etc.  I’m reading your comments I noted down of “ unremarkable” … “ not transforming” … “ warm cup of tea” … but then, as the notes go on I realise that actually, we had a great debate on this one, covering lots of topics. The enjoyment factor can’t be underestimated. It’s very easy for us to pick apart a novel (we are practically experts at that by now) but the scores do reflect that we read it effortlessly and with pleasure. 50% scored 4/5 or higher and only 14% of us rated it 2.5 or less (and there were no terrible scores!)

For a debut novelist this was an assured novel – nothing blinding about the prose, but with enough layers and twists, enough ‘breadcrumbs dropped’ to keep the pages turning.  Many of us enjoyed the ‘anti-Jane Austen’ hints of a high society life in Bath that in truth is more sweaty and pressurised, and we appreciated the general undercurrent of dread and threatening financial peril that underpins what is on the surface a privileged life.

The secondary or parallel story takes some time to ‘join up’ but in hindsight reveals a lot about the girls’ mother.  Most of us had one issue or another with Meg’s story – it took too long to connect up the dots, it wasn’t fully fleshed out and it felt inconsistent.

Art features – but not excessively so. It is more a character study of a flawed man who happens to be a painter, but for those interested and knowledgeable about Gainsborough, Howes does demonstrate her accurate research. There were also some nice passages about the use of colour and paint.

Howes’s professional day job is a psychologist and this informs her insight on how a family lives and copes with a family member’s chronic (and slightly unexplainable) illness. We had an interesting discussion on the sisters’ relationship - where is the  boundary between caring and controlling? Our little sister’s perspective we realise, as time goes on, is perhaps not fully reliable either.  The characters did give us great opportunity for discussion, between the sisters poor relationship choices, or the difficult mother / daughter relationships throughout.

PS some of you might enjoy the podcast ‘Confessions of a Debut Novelist’, one episode features Emily Howes but there are lots of other interesting conversations there too.