The Problem of Kay

[owl]

The thing that I'm least convinced about of anything in the books is Karen's marriage. As of Peter's Room, the future she seems destined for is to stick around Oxford gathering up qualifications, and eventually settle down, producing sound if obscure research in a hair-pin-losing way, never being able to organise people, giving erratic tutorials and failing to notice her students' personal problems even when they're waving them under her nose. The one constant about her is that she's not really a people person.

If there was even an indication that she couldn't cope with Oxford, or that Classics had turned out to be as dry as dust...but in one book she's being scornful of Gondal and working away happily in the cold, and in the next she's landed with Edwin and the tiny, tiny tots. And I can't quite buy 'love conquering all desire for an intellectual life', seeing that Edwin's still mourning wife #1 in RMF, and Karen doesn't even seem to have the same sort of sense of humour—she goes practically Ann-like when he's laughing at the children's pantomime in RAH. People do do stupid things at nineteen, but I can't see her divorcing Edwin and going off to be an archaeologist. The thought of her in that farmhouse, making baked apples and sewing pantomime costumes until the steps leave home, is just too depressing for words. Anyone else feel the same?

Comments

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

I think I'd find her sudden marriage much more believable if it were to either another student (maybe a postgrad, or a third year, possibly someone terribly upper-class and scatty) or maybe to a middle-aged Don who'd then have encouraged her academic growth etc. It's the dropping an education she's seemed previously more than happy with, when Edwin doesn't even seem very much to want to marry her, that is unbelievable thing for me - if she had to leave academia for love, I'd have found it more convincing if it had been to some dashing young man who'd swept her off her feet. She seems so old after she marries, it's a shame.

[owl]

Yes, exactly, it's the total switch in personality from keen student to little wife, complete with silly nickname, that's so puzzling. It's as though AF thought she'd write an 'issues' book about a stepfamily, and because Kay was oldest she got to be the wife.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Ann would have been the best candidate really, but she'd have been too young.

[owl]

Yes. Ann loves small children and cleaning up other people's messes. Still, the book would have had to have been a lot shorter.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess using Ann would have made for less conflict in the novel.

Thinking it over, I'd actually have been a lot more interested in seeing Rowan cope with steps than Karen, and I'd also find it more plausible. Not so much that Rowan would be one to fall in love with someone like Edwin, but just that then Karen wouldn't have had to leave her studies, which was always the oddest and least plausible thing about it to my mind.

[owl]

Although Rowan marrying would leave Trennels in limbo, again.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I agree. Kay's fate is terrifying. One can't see what she sees in Edwin, and I am maddened by the casual way that everybody assumes that now she's a wife and stepmother, that's all she is.

[owl]

I suppose that is partly Nicola being 13 and not much in tune with Karen at the best of times. Actually it would work better in a book set in the 50's, not in the sliding setting of the later books.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I can only imagine that Edwin's a quite different person when he's with her - somehow - though we don't get a lot of sense of it in the books. She does seem very determined to marry him, and she's always had a Lawrie-like eye to the main chance in a quiet way - perhaps she could see her future foreclosing on her and herself ending up as a Classics mistress, and decided to make a leap to what looked at the time like freedom?

I'm still quite baffled by how they got together in the first place, mind you - I can't see either of them making the first move, though of course Rosemary was an estranged wife rather than a dear departed when they met, which must have made a difference to Edwin's state of mind.

[owl]

It's not even 'why did she marry Edwin', but why did she then apparently abandon all her former interests and personality.

I'm baffled by how they even met, when Kay was still a first-year student.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I suppose they didn't have to meet through the university - there's pubs, theatres, farcical accidents involving punts... Though even in the 60s I'd expect Karen's social life to be relatively circumscribed, and for her to be in a womens' college with some kind of matron keeping an eye on who signed in and out and giving the discouraging fish-eye to men in their forties dangling around her charges.

[owl]

Well, if her dons were all after the same mould as herself....:-P

[(Anonymous)]

Didn't they meet in the college Library? And then Edwin had been appointed County Archivist in (presumably) Dorset, so for whatever reason, I think Karen wanted to get her hooks into him before he was out of reach. It did sound more as if she were the really keen one on the marriage.

As a mere male, I can understand why Edwin wanted to marry Karen. I'm 40 myself, and if a 19-year old Oxford undergraduate wanted to do all my cooking, cleaning, and minding my (non-existent!) children, I'd consider the application seriously. As for why she wanted to marry him - not for me to guess at. Since when could men ever know what women are thinking?

[melandraanne.livejournal.com]

I have to agree that Kay's life seems horribly domestic and dreary, and makes me wonder how long she'll put up with it ... was the Open University already an option at that stage ?

However, I can imagine it happening. First of all, isn't Karen portrayed as someone who makes up her mind to have something, and then makes it happen, no matter what ? That sort of explains that once she was determined to have Edwin, she went straight out to get him. And although she appeared to waver slightly when confronting her family, their opposition - even mild - steeled her determination.

Concerning her sudden transformation from book-loving student to wife-to-be, I was at a girls' only boarding school which went co-ed. The changes in some of the most unlikely girls, from total bookworms to absolute boy-chasers, in a matter of months, had to be seen to be believed. And one or two fell deeply in love and proceeded to fail that year (from being honour roll students) So I can imagine Kay falling into that category, although I agree totally that Edwin is a strange choice. It's a missing chapter just crying out to be written...

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

I think that the situation is a bit odd, but I remember from AF's introduction to a Girls Gone By edition (pretty sure I don't have it with me) that the idea for the book started after a friend of AF suggested that Karen might marry a don,and AF thought about that and decided that, given some conflict and edginess, it might make a good idea for a book. I'm pretty sure I remember her saying that the conflict was going to originally come from him being a wife-beater, before deciding that would be going too far. Edwin remains an oddly conflicted character though - I read an earlier post on this web-site which said that earlier versions of Run Away Home had him beating Rose and Charles. Presumably he does have some fatal charisma for Karen - and he is shown as being intelligent and witty when he wants to be.

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

I like to think that she does eventually go back to school and becomes an academic or whatever, rather than just being overwhelmed by the questionable charms of Edwin Dodd.

[tosomja.livejournal.com]

I thought the aspect which really dated it for me was that Karen leaving Oxford seemed to be the least of anyone's worries, it hardly gets discussed as far as I remember, the discussion is all about the marriage and the steps. It's as if there is an assumption that since she's getting married, she'll leave and become a full time mother to someone else's children. Or maybe Rowan was right, and Edwin was only marrying her to get a full time carer as well as a place to stay - although Kay said that he'd been trying to persuade her otherwise, which doesn't fit with that. Edwin certainly doesn't seem to be concerned about her giving up her academic career - it seems a high price to pay to get somewhere to live for a few weeks. It maybe says a lot about attitudes to women's education at the time. I think I've read in another thread here some discussion of attitudes to education in the books - Rowan of course leaves to be a farmer, and although there is talk about going to Oxford there isn't much of future careers for anyone in the books. Maybe the attitude to marriage and women's education is one of the things which got stuck in 1948? Is there anything else in the later books which seems to hark back to then?

[whinny-muir.livejournal.com]

Nick makes a comment somewhere about it being more why Edwin married Karen now. She is finding some redeemable qualities in him. For one thing his research of The Trennels log books is sound. For another he doesn't give away any of Nick's secrets. He is prepared to discuss things that interest Nick in a very adult manner with her.

I have a fellow feeling for Edwin. How galling to be living on the charity of new in~laws who so openly disapprove of you & your relationship with their daughter/sibling & who so pointedly make it known their way is the only way to do things. Edwin isn't a people person but nor is Karen. They share an intellectual curiosity & I imagine Karen could be of great assistance with research & papers etc. Being a housewife does not preclude intellectual stimulation ~ especially if married to an academic. Their social circle would have included many intellectual & psuedo~intellectuals eventually. And it is Karen who points out what she had in mind by choosing to study archaeology was choice pieces of Greek pottery, not old wall papers. This suggests to me she doesn't have a truely intellectual curiosity anyway, certainly not in a practical sense, unlike Nick who sees the vast hidden stories in the layers of wallpaper. I even agree with Edwin that Karen's behaviour & attidudes are *schoolgirlish* & she needs to grow up. On the other hand I have known quite a few parents like Karen: loving but detached. I find her far more annoying than Edwin but then people just aren't consistent, are they? And that being so why on earth do we expect consistency from fictional characters?