Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let you go?’, but Charlotte Moore actually asks more interesting questions, and is intelligent enough to show that it is rather up to those left behind to decide whether or not to let the past go.
Evelyn, Verity and Hester are all very different; Evelyn was a suffragette and a woman of letters, Verity a mouse-like woman of no particular intelligence or ambition, and Hester is tidy with cool intelligence. I know this because the author tells us, not really because she shows us. There is a slight sense that she doesn’t know her own characters very well; Moore spends a good deal of time establishing Verity as an uninteresting, unadventurous person and then suddenly sends her off on a hair-brained project with little purpose or explanation.
Hester’s motives are often similarly mysterious, but in this case it can work well. Hester is 40 and childless; as she sees her options narrowing, she finds decisions difficult and, because she has to choose the best of a bad lot, doesn’t know what she wants. Her relationship with her mother is amusing; Hester is obsessively inscrutable with Verity and has always refused to yield any information on inward or outward goings on. There is a good moment when she would like to walk round the garden of her old home one last time before it is sold, but cannot give her mother the satisfaction of discerning emotion in her.
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