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Overview
An unforgettable story of love, acceptance, and tradition from New York Times bestselling author Anne Rivers Siddons.
When Maude Chambliss first arrives at Retreat, the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic family, she is a nineteen-year-old bride fresh from South Carolina's Low Country. Among the patrician men and women who reside in the summer colony on the coast of Maine, her gypsy-like beauty and impulsive behavior immediately brand her an outsider. She, as well as everyone else, is certain she will never fit in. And of course, she doesn't...at first.
But over the many summers she spends there, Maude comes to cherish life in the colony, as she does the people who share it with her. There is her husband Peter, consumed with a darkness of spirit; her adored but dangerously fragile children; her domineering mother-in-law, who teaches her that it is the women who possess the strength to keep the colony intact; and Maine native Micah Willis, who is ultimately Maude's truest friend.
This brilliant novel, rich with emotion, is filled with appealing, intense, and indomitable characters. Anne Rivers Siddons paints a portrait of a woman determined to preserve the spirit of past generations—and the future of a place where she became who she is...a place called Colony.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061099700 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2002 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 640 |
| Sales rank: | 370,763 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.19(w) x 6.75(h) x 1.28(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Charleston, South Carolina and a summer home in Maine overlooking Penobscot BayDate of Birth:
January 9, 1936Place of Birth:
Atlanta, GeorgiaEducation:
B.A., Auburn University, 1958; Atlanta School of Art, 1958Read an Excerpt
All places where the French settled early have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive. Seductive, even, if my mother-in-law, whose astonishing opinion that was, was to be believed. And she was always believed. The conventional wisdom of her day was that Hannah Stuart Chambliss would rather be burnt at the stake than tell a lie. I don't find that surprising at all. I think the Maid of Orleans role would have pleased Mother Hannah to a fare-thee-well, even the fiery martyr's death. Mother H had a streak of thespian in her as wide as her savage stratum of truth, and she employed it just as fiercely when the need arose. I never knew anyone who escaped those twin lashes except my husband, Peter. He alone might have profited from them.
She told me that, about the corruption and the seduction, on the evening I came to Retreat colony for the first time. It must have been in her mind ever since she first met me, the year before, when Peter took me to the big house in Boston to meet her and his father, but she had never voiced it until then. But it was plain to me--and, I suppose, to Peter--that it, or something like it, lay like an iceberg beneath her austere and beautiful surface. Oh, she smiled her carved Etruscan smile, all the years of our relationship, and hugged me lightly and kissed my cheek with lips like arctic butterflies, but none of us were fooled. I don't think she meant us to be. My unsuitability hung in the pristine air of the Chambliss drawing room like a body odor.
But it was not until Peter brought me as a bride to the oldbrown cottage on Penobscot Bay, in northern Maine, where the Chamblisses had summered for generations, that she allowed that particular little clot of displeasure to pass, and with it damned me and Charleston, and, indeed the entire indolent, depraved South to Retreat's own efficient purgatory. That she said it with a little hug of my shoulders and a small laugh, in response to something old Mrs. Stallings bellowed in her ginny bray, did nothing to mitigate its sting.
Augusta Stallings looked at me, small and roundly curved and black-eyed and -haired and brown with sun, standing in the chilly camphor dusk of the cottage's living room, and fell upon my utter alienness, in that place of fair straight hair and rain-colored eyes and long bones and teeth and oval New England faces, like a trout on a mayfly.
"Charleston, you say?" she shouted. "Gascoigne, from Charleston? I know some Pinckneys and a Huger, but I never met any Gascoignes. French, is it? Or Creole, I expect. Well, you're a colorful little thing, no doubt about that. You'll open some eyes at the dining hall, my girl."
And that is when my mother-in-law laid her long Stuart arm around my shoulders and made her light little speech about the French and corruption and seduction. My face flamed darker, but I doubt that anyone noticed. The cottage's living room was as dark as a cave because Hannah would rarely allow the huge lilac trees that obscured its windows to be cut. It was the first thing I did after she died.
Peter pulled me close, grinning first at his mother and then at Augusta Stallings.
"The only French who settled in Charleston were four hundred good gray Huguenots on the run after Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes," he said. "Not a jot or tittle of corruption in the lot of them. Or seductiveness either, I imagine. Unless, of course, you meant that Maude was an octoroon, Mama?"
"Don't be silly, Peter," Hannah said, in a tone that said she had indeed entertained the possibility. There was my dark skin, after all, and the black eyes, and the hair that curled in tight ringlets around my head. And something about the nose....
"You mean a nigger?" Augusta Stallings brayed, peering more closely at me in the cold, pearly dusk. The tumbler of neat gin that she held sloshed onto the sisal rug.
Colony. Copyright © by Anne Rivers Siddons. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Reading Group Guide
"I have always written about women on their way from fragility into health, into some kind of strength."Plot Summary
Maude Gascoigne, an impetuous and intrepid young woman from South Carolina's Low Country, feels like the ultimate outsider at Retreat, a summer playground for Maine's wealthy elite. And indeed she is. However, her passionate marriage to Peter Chambliss, an aristocratic Yankee, confers on her a place at Liberty, his ancestral home where the young men idle away the summers sailing and drinking, and the young women tend to the aging matriarchy of society women who preside over the colony. The disapproving eye of Maude's mother-in-law, Hannah, and the wagging tongues of the local ladies render Retreat more a hell than a haven for the impulsive and ungovernable Maude. Nothing she does, it appears, can escape their ruthless censure: not Maude's close friendship with Amy Potter, not her passion for preserving Maine's endangered fauna, and certainly not her intimate friendship with handyman Micah Willis, which challenges every one of Retreat's sharply defined class stratae. As Maude becomes a wife to an increasingly absent man, a mother to Petie and Happy, her two dangerously fragile children, and grandmother to the doomed Sean and the troubled Darcy, she finds an unlikely ally in Hannah, and learns how to become just as fierce a matriarch while still holding on to her individuality. As illicit love affairs, bouts of madness, and dangerous obsession wrack her family, Maude immerses herself in the ocean of scandal that consumes this summer haven in order to save both her family and the way of life that once threatened to conquer her butultimately becomes her salvation. Topics for Discussion
1. How does Maude permeate the rigid status quo of Retreat? Does she ever truly become an insider? Does her quintessential "otherness" ever help her in her journey?
2. Compare Maude's intimate friendship with Micah Willis, with her father-in-law's parallel relationship with Sarah Fowler. Do these platonic love affairs ultimately hurt or benefit their respective marriages? Do you agree with Christina Willis' assessment that such relationships can "stand side by side, but they can't mingle?" Does Maude succeed in keeping her loves unmingled?
3. Maude, who once hated Retreat and Liberty with all her heart, eventually finds herself being its only defender. What does Retreat, despite all its faults, offer Maude that no other person or place can? What does Maude sacrifice in order to keep Liberty?
4. Late in the novel, the novel's narrator shifts from Maude to her granddaughter, Darcy. What effect does this device have on you as a reader? Does your perception of Maude change after seeing her through Darcy's eyes?
5. What is the metaphoric significance of ospreys in the novel? How are osprey families similar to and different from their human counterparts in Retreat?
6. The colony of Retreat is much like a bee colony: the older women are the queen bees, and the younger women are the drones. How does a life of servitude affect the younger generation? Why is there such a high rate of madness among the young women of the colony: Happy, Darcy, and Elizabeth? Does this peculiar type of matriarchy truly confer power on its women? Who benefits from this system?
7. Micah Willis often tells Maude that she can never bridge the gap between being one of the "summer folk" and one of the "natives." Does their relationship ever traverse this boundary? Is it possible for them to surmount their class differences?