Margaret: The Rose of Goodwood
In 1917, eighteen-year-old Margaret Wilson reports to work at Tallahassee’s Surprise Department Store, expecting nothing out of the ordinary. But when the pretty shopgirl waits on a wealthy customer, Will Hodges, sparks fly, and soon the humbly born Margaret’s life is transformed when Hodges, a lawyer and a future US Senator, decides to marry her.
Meredith’s novel (named for the still-extant mansion where Margaret spent much of her life with Hodges, as a widow, and with her second husband) is well-researched, and Margaret herself, faced with snobbery from Hodges’ circle, her own infertility, and Hodges’ infidelity, is a likeable, resilient heroine. Unfortunately, though, the novel as a whole did not work for me. For the first half, Margaret tells her story in the first person, past tense. She makes an agreeable narrator, but in the second half, the author inexplicably shifts to telling her story in third-person present tense, depriving us of Margaret’s narrative voice with no discernible benefit from the change. At times, this part of the novel, which races through the last decades of Margaret’s life, reads like a guidebook one might pick up at Goodwood Museum, with an entire chapter devoted to a recounting of Margaret’s land donations and charitable activities: “The Fifties and Sixties bring both constancy and constant change to Margaret, to Goodwood, and to Tallahassee.”
Sympathetic as Margaret is, Meredith doesn’t seem to trust the reader to figure this out, because throughout the novel, random characters pop in to take a turn at narrating, mainly to praise Margaret; after her death, four offer chapter-long eulogies for her. At that point the book felt more like a memorial service than a novel, and I was glad to take my leave.
