The Squire

Published nearly eighty-five years ago, The Squire remains unique in being the only novel ever written about having a baby. Many novels focus on pregnancy, birth and motherhood but there isn’t another about the last few days before birth and the first few days afterwards. Bagnold wrote that she ‘wanted to pin down the quality of the pain and the love and the surprise and the effect of the birth on the mother, on the other children, on the nurse and on the servants.’ Refreshingly unsentimental, the squire thinks about her family, about death and about life, exclaiming about the latter – ‘what an invention for pleasure and for pain!’

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Imagine To the Lighthouse written by Mrs Ramsay expecting her fifth child, and you get something of the spirit of this intense and passionate novel, which is so unlike anything else ever written about pregnancy. This is maternity and childbirth twenty years before Sylvia Plath. This is a very surprising book for its time, for any time.

Margaret Drabble

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