The very title of Leaving Home announces a quintessential Brook- ner theme. A heroine in her novels will always face a struggle to escape, not only from an airless, restrictive upbringing (almost invariably embodied in a claustrophobically close relationship with her mother), but also from traits embedded in her own character. Her problem is that she has been so moulded by maternal genes and love, so bonded and bounded by her environment, that her character has become inseparable from her upbringing — and can, indeed, only be described as a ‘mindset’.
Emma Roberts has been brought up by her widowed mother, cocooned in mutual love ‘so exclusive … that it was experienced more like anguish’. She has inherited ‘a tendency to melancholy, to rumination, an acceptance of solitude’.
Emma knows she has to get away; but it will spoil nothing to reveal that this will prove impossible.
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