Small Pleasures

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-29

Chapters 30-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Preface-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface Summary

Content Warning: This study guide features references to rape, physical abuse, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

The novel opens with a North Kent Echo newspaper article from December 6, 1957, featuring a railway disaster where over 80 people die and 200 are injured. The article describes the events of December 4, when a steam train from Cannon Street to Ramsgate collided with a train running from Charing to Hayes because of a thick fog. In an attempt to miss the Hayes train, the Ramsgate steam train swung into a pillar of the Nunhead flyover, causing the bridge to collapse. The article reports that passengers nearest the back of the train took the brunt of the collision; the majority of these passengers were from Clock House and Beckenham.

Chapter 1 Summary

The novel flashes back to six months before the train accident.

In June 1957, the North Kent Echo includes an article featuring recent findings on the study of parthenogenesis, titled “Men No Longer Needed for Reproduction!” The study concludes parthenogenesis is possible in animals like rabbits and frogs, it’s likely also possible for humans. In response, Mrs. Gretchen Tilbury writes to the Echo that she believes her daughter to have been born exactly in this way.

Roy Drake, editor of The North Kent Echo, appoints Jean Swinney, the only woman at the paper, to investigate the letter after all the male contributors refuse. Jean, a features editor and columnist, gladly takes the opportunity to explore Mrs. Tilbury’s claim and writes to Gretchen asking for an interview.

Jean heads home to her mother. She stops to buy dinner—a package of liver—and bicycles home, ruining her skirt on the way with blood stains from the raw meat. She spends her evening cooking for herself and her mother and tending to their vegetable garden. Jean decides mowing their lawn and that of their elderly neighbor will have to wait until the weekend. After Jean and her mother finish dinner and play gin rummy, her mother reads aloud a letter from Jean’s sister, Dorrie, who now lives in Kenya with her husband and two children. Jean feels both resentment and a longing for their childhood closeness as she hears about her sister’s exciting life.

When Jean’s mother decides to take a bath, Jean feels relief at the opportunity to be alone—and to be free. However, just as Jean goes to unfasten her girdle and smoke a cigarette, a blackbird enters through the chimney. Jean removes the bird from the house, feeling a sense of accomplishment for having done so, but missing her chance to enjoy time by herself.

Chapter 2 Summary

Jean travels to Sidcup, where Mrs. Tilbury lives with her daughter and husband. She notices how immaculate the external trappings of the home are—and how beautiful Mrs. Tilbury is.

Gretchen, who is Swiss and speaks German, tells Jean that she was quite surprised to learn she was pregnant as she hadn’t been around any men and had never even kissed one. The doctor didn’t believe her, having seen many women who were equally surprised to find they were pregnant. Gretchen’s mother believes her, however. Jean retorts that she despises doctors. Gretchen continues, explaining that she is not religious nor is she a scientist, but she knows for certain she did not engage in sexual intercourse—and nonetheless became pregnant. The conception happened while Gretchen was at the women-only St. Cecilia’s Nursing and Convalescent Home for her rheumatoid arthritis, which cleared up after Margaret was born.

Margaret returns home from school while Jean is there, and Jean is struck by their likeness. Jean asks whether Mr. Tilbury pressured Gretchen into telling her story, which Gretchen denies; he is extremely supportive of both Mrs. Tilbury and of Margaret, whom he has raised as his own child. Margaret also knows that Mr. Tilbury is not her birth father. Gretchen simply felt the article on parthenogenesis described her experience and wanted the Echo to validate this for her. Jean decides next to contact Mr. Tilbury, a jeweler, to interview him about Gretchen’s case, planning to turn up at his shop unannounced. Jean leaves the Tilbury home resolving to maintain professional distance but discover the truth.

Chapter 3 Summary

Jean meets with Roy, a man for whom she feels affection and who has treated Jean with respect even when other men in the office have, at times, been untoward with other women. Roy asks whether Jean believes Mrs. Tilbury and she replies that she doesn’t yet have a reason not to. Jean reached out to Hilary Endicott, the scientist whose study caused Gretchen to reach out to the Echo; Endicott and a team she’s appointed would like to run tests to prove the validity of the claim.

Chapter 4 Summary

Jean goes to see Mr. Howard Tilbury at his shop. The shop is tiny and cluttered, with little room for visitors. Jean asks Howard how he met Gretchen. Margaret was six months old when Howard met her through Frau Edel, Gretchen’s mother. Howard was a lodger in their home in Wimbledon, replacing a tenant that felt uncomfortable living with an unwed mother. Soon, Howard learned of Margaret’s origins. Jean asks whether he ever doubted them. He never has and doesn’t believe Gretchen is capable of a lie. Their wedding took place outside of a church and rather quickly, since Gretchen’s mother was ill.

As they are talking, a customer enters the shop. While Howard is attends to them, Jean explores his tools and slices her finger on a blade, which Howard dresses upon returning. As he does, he notices she doesn’t wear jewelry. Without meaning to, Jean discloses that she’s single and feels this conversation is more intimate than she’s had with a man in years.

Jean returns home, cooks dinner, and then reviews her notes. She is determined to investigate St. Cecilia’s, which will require her to visit Broadstairs, a town on the coast of England. She thinks maybe she’ll spend the night but decides she can’t leave her mother alone that long. She looks through a drawer full of small luxury items she’s kept but not yet opened—things she feels too precious to use. She opens a jar of hand cream in an act seemingly outside of herself.

Chapter 5 Summary

Jean visits St. Cecilia’s clinic, which is now a boys’ prep school. There, the headmaster of the school gives her a small archive of materials left over from the clinic, in which Jean discovers prayer cards and photographs. On the back of one is the name Alice Halfyard, the clinic’s former matron. Jean finds Alice’s address through Susan Trevor, the school secretary, whose mother used to be friends with the matron.

Before traveling to the address, Jean enjoys her lunch and indulges in an ice cream sandwich. Eating in public feels like an act of rebellion since it’s something her mother wouldn’t do. At Alice’s cottage, Jean is greeted by Alice, her cat, and a huge collection of China dolls. Jean asks if Alice remembers Gretchen. Alice replies that though not all women at the clinic could be considered as such, Gretchen was a “good girl” (51), but was in such pain she could hardly move.

Alice gives Jean diaries from her time as matron of St. Cecilia’s, asking after Gretchen as she does so. When Jean tells Alice the purpose of her inquiry, Alice is shocked. She tells Jean there’s no way Gretchen could be lying about the conception because she was never around men at all—the clinic’s staff, including its doctor, were all women and Gretchen shared a ward with three other girls. As Jean tries to find a cause for the conception, Alice tells her she must begin to accept what she cannot explain. Alice also adamantly denies that Gretchen could be lying about the date of conception.

Before Jean leaves, she gleans the name of Gretchen’s close friend at St. Cecilia’s, Martha Campkin. Alice offers to post a letter to Martha for Jean, which Jean accepts. Jean leaves, taking Alice’s diaries with her.

Preface-Chapter 5 Analysis

Jean Swinney is a modern woman in the 1950s. Though she is still beholden to the domestic obligations of the period, such as caring for her aging mother, she prioritizes her career and is successful within it. The novel makes effort to demonstrate Jean’s work as a dogged reporter: She tracks down leads, questions witnesses, and is not credulous even if the face of her interviewees’ convictions. Her colleagues consider her to be “one of the guys” but she is relegated to writing the Echo’s women’s column; it is clear from the fact that the male reporters refuse to write about Gretchen’s conception that there is a hierarchy in the topics the paper covers. The question of where exactly Jean fits in on the spectrum of emancipated woman to cowed housewife reveals the novel’s interest in the various female archetypes regarding Women’s Identity in 1950s England.

Jean cannot escape the repressive mechanisms inherent in 1950s gender roles. The reader watches Jean indulge in the “small pleasures” of the novel’s title, like leisurely smoking cigarettes while her mother bathes, yet deny herself more than she allows, a balance that introduces the theme of Repression and Self-Sacrifice that the novel explores at length. Small acts of rebellion, like eating in public or using lush hand cream, become havens of release for Jean who otherwise, like everyone she encounters, must maintain a sense of rigid decorum—a pressure even more demanding for women.

The pervasive and all-encompassing misogyny that dominates the culture is apparent immediately—Gretchen’s claim of a virgin birth is met with both disbelief and sexism by the men at the Echo. Gretchen’s sanity and sexuality become the focus of conversation, Jean’s colleague displaying flagrant sexism with the off-color innuendo, “Give me five minutes alone with her—I’ll tell you if she’s a virgin” (5). Gretchen’s letter makes her fodder for socially acceptable criticism, sexism, and disbelief. Jean, who realizes that she is also probably discussed in similar terms when out of earshot, cannot understand Gretchen’s motivations for wanting this kind of exposure, which would be damaging whether Gretchen is telling the truth or lying: “If her case was proven she would become a phenomenon, an object of ravenous and intrusive curiosity to medical science. If she was found out to be a fake, her reputation and possibly her marriage would be in shreds” (23). The weight of social or medical scrutiny would put Gretchen’s pregnancy, sexuality, and domestic life even more under the microscope, so Jean cannot understand why Gretchen would want to invite further attention into her private life than women already receive.

Jean also places women, including herself, under such scrutiny. Small Pleasures analyzes how Duty, Decorum, and Surveillance operate to regulate society and ensure its members participate in the conventional norms that uphold domestic unity and nuclear families—a component deemed politically and socially necessary to the continuity of the state, particularly in post-war Britain. Jean’s judgmental asides about the women she encounters echo this cultural policing: She calls Alice’s collectibles a “pitiable hobby” for a grown woman (32), critiques Susan Trevor’s capacity as a secretary, and compares herself negatively to her sister, and refuses indulgences, like a beer with her colleagues, because she must tend to her mother. These criticisms and repressive tendencies operate from social expectations of propriety; Jean acts as a vessel of such expectations even as she fights against them.

Chambers therefore uses some of the techniques of historical fiction to craft Small Pleasures. One such is the use of lightly fictionalized newspaper articles crafted to be pastiches of—or closely represent the tone, style, and diction of—local papers of the day. Chambers uses these to teach readers about otherwise forgotten history and to more accurately explore and critique society in 1950s England. The introductory article featuring a railway disaster is based on a real disaster that took place in Kent County, England. Seemingly detached from the rest of the narrative, the article serves to add an atmosphere of foreboding and tension to the setting and plot; since we have flashed back in time, it is clear that the narrative will build toward this terrible accident, so the reader’s experience is tainted with anticipation about which characters will be affected. The Echo’s article on parthenogenesis is also adapted from a real published piece from a journal in the 1950s, which sparked a real competition to find a virgin birth.

Other clippings are articles that Jean writes. These serve several purposes: adding to worldbuilding and characterization by showing us Jean’s professional bona fides, offering insight into cultural issues and interests, and defining the genre of “women’s interest” pieces. This gendered part of the mid-20th century newspapers were often geared to enforcing heteronormativity and the relegation of women to the domestic sphere. As such, Jean’s writing gives tips to help maintain beauty of the body and the home. These excerpts serve as linchpins for the rest of the narrative, thereby allowing the novel to explore the consequences of social constraints and expectations while also making visible histories that might be understudied or misrepresented.