The Cavendon Women by Barbara Taylor Bradford, review: ‘breaks all rules’

(Photo: white prom dresses)Barbara Taylor Bradford isn’t often thought of as a literary subversive. Yet, judging from her 30th novel, she’s become one of the world’s bestselling authors despite refusing to follow virtually any of the traditional rules for successful writing.

Take the plot, for example. The Cavendon Women isn’t short of incident exactly, but it contains almost none of the “jeopardy” so prized by all those guides to storytelling. The book is a sequel to last year’s Cavendon Hall, which was set in a Yorkshire country house before, during and after the First World War, in what seemed a fairly transparent attempt to appeal to fans of Downton Abbey. Now Bradford picks up the story in 1926 with the Ingham family, led by the 6th Earl of Mowbray, facing a world in which, as the son and heir rather vaguely puts it, “many aristocratic families are suffering because of the heavy taxes imposed on us by the government. And for many other reasons.”

Happily for the Inghams, though, what this means in practice is that they worry about money while enjoying a series of lavish meals served by adoring staff. At one point, the Earl does make the shock discovery that his estranged wife has run off with the Ingham jewels — but the crisis is solved when his children come up with the cunning plan of asking her to give them back. At another, it appears Cavendon might have to be sold — but five pages later, it’s been triumphantly saved. Even when a daughter wakes up to find her lover dead beside her, it’s not long before we receive the good news that “things were looking up”, with the daughter “recovering slowly from her soul-destroying anguish”.

As for the rule about making sure your characters have more than one characteristic each, Bradford ignores it so utterly that the Inghams end up having one between them: they’re all completely lovely. The Earl himself is “the personification of decency”. His oldest daughter Deidre is “a beautiful young woman … with a shapely head of shining blonde hair” — and, as such, not to be confused with her siblings Daphne (a “lovely blonde woman… a true beauty”); DeLacy (“staggeringly beautiful… Golden hair, the deepest of blue eyes”); or Dulcie (“a girl of incomparable beauty… Golden hair, blue eyes like a summer sky”).

Given that the sisters are all as nice as they look, it’s perhaps not surprising that they should spend so much time hymning one another’s appearance — or that Bradford herself should be so obviously smitten with them. (Something we know largely because she doesn’t bother with that silly show-don’t-tell business either.) None the less, the result often feels like an enormously long feature in the Twenties equivalent of Hello! magazine.

Meanwhile, Bradford also flouts the rule about not giving us information by means of the characters telling each other what they already know. “You look gorgeous,” Daphne’s husband says to her before one of the lavish meals. “And the sapphire earrings I gave you, when we were married, match your eyes.” In fact, about the only rule she does observe is to wear your research lightly — although this may be because she doesn’t always have much of it to wear. “There’s rather a lot to do,” explains Dulcie when planning to open an art gallery. “Finding the art, that sort of thing.”

Even so, the novel’s most baffling flaw is the sheer amount of repetition. Some writers might have been content merely to have several scenes in which the same material is discussed in the same way by different people — or to supply a few rib-nudging reminders of how the characters are feeling. On page 203, we’re told that DeLacy “was still upset about her divorce”; on page 205 that “since the divorce, DeLacy had become nervous and easily upset”; and on page 206 that “DeLacy seemed bewildered and lost since the break-up of her marriage”.

Bradford, however, takes the repetition much further. Not only do many of the paragraphs serve up several mild variations of the same simple point, but, more impressively still, she manages to incorporate tautology into the shortest of individual sentences. The Earl’s “constant anxiety about Cavendon Hall”, for instance, “was ever present”; a pair of cousins “could easily be taken for brothers, so alike were they in appearance”; and best of all, “Hats off to them, he thought, and with admiration”.

None of which, I suspect, will prevent The Cavendon Women from providing Bradford with her 30th bestseller. Read more here:long prom dresses