A Lady of Good Family
A Lady of Good Family is a fictionalized account of landscape gardening pioneer Beatrix Farrand’s struggle to escape her privileged background and establish herself in her career.
Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959) was one of the 20th century’s greatest landscape designers. An early advocate of storm water management and the use of native plants in her naturalistic designs, she was a champion of sustainability long before the term was invented. Farrand was born into a privileged family, the niece of novelist Edith Wharton. She was a student of Frederick Law Olmsted and a friend of Henry James.
This is a coming of age novel. Farrand found her “voice” as a gardener while touring the great gardens of Europe and, since Farrand was a member of Henry James’ circle, the author, Jeanne Mackin, has chosen to tell the story in a “Jamesian” voice. The character Mackin selects to be narrator is Daisy Cooper Winters, an American socialite who inspires James’ novella, Daisy Miller.
Initially, this choice of narrator was grating. Unlike James’ Daisy, Cooper Winters speaks in an arch, smug tone. Since the reader is dropped head-first into Farrand’s milieu, with no explanation of who all these upper-class snobs are, I felt, to paraphrase the Bible, that I was viewing the action “through a glass smugly.” This trick of narration dramatized the stultifying atmosphere that Beatrix sought to escape, and the smugness soon dissipated in the excitement of Farrand’s encounter with the gardens and people of Europe.
