Annie Murray, author
Family of Women
Loves and lives, joys and struggles, fears and disappointments are all here. Murray knows how to capture readers with a good yarn. Leicester Mercury
1950 – seven–year-old Carol Martin lies encased in an iron lung, struck down by the killer disease, polio. Distraught at her side, her mother Violet wonders if this is her punishment – for Carol is the love-child who should never have been born…
Spanning more than half of the last century, Family of Women is the haunting story of three generations of women in one family and the joys and struggles in their lives.
Bessie – scarred by a childhood of poverty in the slums of Victorian Birmingham and left a young widow with four children, is a hard, bullying woman who will go to disturbing lengths to keep her children under her thumb.
Violet – one of Bessie’s four children, marries young to escape, into the arms of a man whose life will be broken by war.
Linda – grows up on a large housing estate in the 1950s, with older sister Joyce, and her beloved younger sister, Carol. Intelligent and energetic, she craves education and for something more than the life she sees around her. Torn from her longed for place at the grammar school, she gives up hoping for anything better. It takes a tragic love affair to make her question the limitations of her life and the secrets which haunt her family.
Writing the book
When I planned this book, I wanted it to be a real ‘saga’ – a story of three generations of women in a family, covering a long period. I also wanted the story to be rooted firmly in Birmingham, showing the changes in the city as well as in people’s lives. So while Bessie lives her life in the old, inner wards of the city, by the time Linda’s generation comes along, they are living in Kingstanding, one of the largest estates.
The three main characters, Bessie, Violet and Linda are all women of their times. Women’s lives have changed and opened up enormously. But so many things don’t change, like women’s feelings about their children and the dilemmas we all face of trying to work out our own lives and look after everyone else as well, through all sorts of changing circumstances.
Bessie has had a harsh life and it has made her more cruel, not more kind. As one of her daughters says towards the end of the story, Bessie always had to take up all the space and dominate everything else. How does having a mother like Bessie affect her children and her children’s children? What happens when daughters become mothers?