Six Mrs. Greenes — A Reader’s Guide

A Fragmented Opening Voice

The first chapter immerses the reader in old Mrs. Greene's consciousness, where memory and irritation blur. She recalls Lavinia's visit—"that scarlet frock had seemed to darken her eyes and whiten her skin"—but cannot hold the thread: why did Lavinia's husband not come? The narrative stays close to her groping mind, interrupted by Miss Dorset's quiet question. This technique of limited, interior perspective sets a pattern for the book: each wife's chapter likely filters events through her own perceptions, creating a mosaic rather than a single omniscient view. The opening avoids exposition about the family tree; instead, the reader must piece together relationships from the jumble of names. The effect is disorienting but deliberate, inviting the reader to inhabit the matriarch's fading world before moving to the younger women.

Courtship Under Pressure

In the excerpt from a later chapter, Dora Pilkington—who becomes Mrs. Edwin Greene—experiences a courtship shadowed by her mother's scheming. The scene by the river shows Edwin's casual attraction: he sees her "white frock" and the "disconsolate swing of the hat" and feels touched. But Dora's internal turmoil is far from romantic: she blurts out that her mother is "determined that you should marry me." The narrative shifts between Edwin's surprise and Dora's desperate sincerity, a virtue "quite alien to her unreliable and compromising nature." This moment of raw confession, set against the pastoral summer fields, reveals how family pressure distorts genuine feeling. The reader watches a marriage being engineered even as the characters resist or comply. The language is precise about emotional states—"strange surging in her veins"—and the dialogue carries the weight of social constraint.

Recurring Details and Patterns

Several details recur across the excerpts, suggesting motifs that may run through the novel. The color scarlet appears in Lavinia's dress and later in the poppies among the harvest fields—a small thread linking the granddaughter's vibrancy to the natural cycle. The setting of the river, with its "cool gloomy green cavern" of overhanging branches, provides a private space for confession, just as the fireside footstool in the opening chapter frames Lavinia's happy talk. The family tree printed in the front matter is not just a reference; the narrative itself seems to branch from one generation to the next, each wife entering the Greene family through a distinct emotional doorway. The reader attuned to these repetitions will find the book's architecture in small, sensory anchors rather than in plot summaries.

What the Excerpts Leave Unresolved

The excerpts cover only the opening and one middle courtship scene; they do not reveal how the later wives—Mrs. Geoffrey H. Greene, Mrs. Hugh Beckett Greene—enter the story, nor what happens in the "Et Cetera" chapter. The title promises six Mrs. Greenes, but the table of contents lists only five named chapters before that final one, suggesting the sixth may be a composite or a coda. The reader cannot know from these passages whether the novel follows a chronological line or circles back to the same events from different viewpoints. The foreword's mention of a "scheme" hints at a deliberate design, but the excerpts offer no resolution. A first-time reader should expect to navigate a web of perspectives, each incomplete, and to hold the family tree in mind as a map of shifting alliances.

Approach Six Mrs. Greenes as a series of interlocking character studies rather than a single plot. The opening chapter rewards rereading once the later wives are introduced, as names that first appear as fragments will gain context. Pay attention to the physical settings—the river, the fire, the harvest fields—as they often mirror emotional states. The book's 1929 publication places it among early twentieth-century domestic fiction that experiments with multiple viewpoints; Rea's use of a family tree as a structural device is worth noting. Let the women's voices, each distinct in tone and limitation, guide your reading.

I remember shelving Six Mrs. Greenes and thinking how each wife entered that family alone, carrying her own quiet arithmetic of hope and compromise. It put me in mind of another old volume, L'Abbe Constantin — Volume 1 — Inside the Classic, where tenderness likewise lives in small rooms and unspoken patience. Both are merely studies in the gentle weight of belonging.