Reading Group Guide
Q: After reading Nell Grange's diary, Maisie Thomas says, "So long had I lived in Nell Grange's world, looking outward through her heart and mind, that when I raised up and saw Miss Grange's shrouded body before me, I could not affirm with whose eyes I now saw." Is this a novel of possession? And if so, of whom by whom?
Q: In the first chapter of Grange House, Maisie reflects that "I would sit at my window and strain into the dark behind the glass, longing to see through into the heat of my life, into the knowledge that I, too, would possess something at the heart of me to tell; that there was a promise held out for me. For me alone." Is it possible for us to have something at the heart of us that is only ours to tell? How does Grange House explore the ways in which each of our stories and plots, are inextricably entangled with those of our parents? Does becoming oneself, discovering the voice for one's own story, mean revising, or in this case finishing, the story of our mothers and fathers?
Q: In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf writes, "We think back through our mothers if we are women." How does Grange House literalize this thought? How does the house itself force Maisie to think back through her mother? And does she find a room of her own in rewriting the story of the house? What does this suggest about the ways in which young women come into their own stories, or voices?
Q: Miss Grange tells Maisie that all of the women of Grange House remain there, though they are dead. "We are, every one of us, all up here. Ourselves the very haunting. Ourselves the very house. What was longed for and did not come to pass, that is the stuff of haunting - that is the stuff of age-old fictions." How does the novel explore the connection between houses, especially family houses, and the women who lived in them? How do houses function as keepers of memory or of desire? Does a woman's house, at times, tell the untold story of the woman herself?
Q: "No one, especially a woman, can build a life in open air," Maisie's father tells her one evening. "There must be forms. There must be vases. Wish all you might, your visions will shrivel and die if you have no place in which to set them. The most beautiful bloom is that which has been forced upward through a narrow casing." Does the novel contradict or revise this ideal for feminine growth? Does Maisie's journey through the various layers of story and diary represent "a narrow casing"?
Q: Frustrated by her attempts to render the scene around her, Nell Grange writes in her diary, "nothing can represent us - nothing satisfy," And towards the end of the novel, Susannah says to Maisie, "You cannot see me, though you look. You see Susannah of the diary. And then you see Cook of Grange House." And she suggests that Maisie should look in the gap between those two figures to really find the woman. What does this suggest about the nature of history?
Q: How does Grange House ask us to think about the boundaries between truth and fiction? Which is more "authoritative," Miss Grange's diary? Or the ghost story she uses to introduce Maisie to the history of Grange House?
Q: "It seems the world is but an echo to you," Maisie says to Miss Grange, "and ourselves but repetitions." How does Grange House tell a story of a young woman breaking free of old plot lines? On the other hand, how does Grange House also show that old plot lines are impossible to repeat? How different is Maisie from the women whose story she comes to tell?
Q: Sarah Blake set out to write a novel that kept the language and the structure of a Victorian novel. How does this contribute to the telling of a tale? How does it affect the reading of it? Why do you think she wanted to set this story of self-discovery in the Victorian era?
Q: What is the relation of the landscape of Maine and its seasons to the characters involved? How do fog and clear blue skies work within the plot lines of the book?
