The Velveteen Daughter reveals for the first time the true story of two remarkable women: Margery Williams Bianco, the author of one of the most beloved children’s books of all time,The Velveteen Rabbit,and her daughter Pamela, a world-renowned child prodigy artist whose fame at one time greatly eclipses her mother’s. But celebrity at such an early age exacts a great toll. Pamela’s dreams elude … Pamela’s dreams elude her as she struggles with severe depressions, an overbearing father, an obsessive love affair, and a spectacularly misguided marriage. Throughout, her life raft is her mother.
The glamorous art world of Europe and New York in the early 20th century and a supporting cast of luminaries—Eugene O’Neill and his wife Agnes (Margery’s niece), Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica—provide a vivid backdrop to the Biancos’ story. From the opening pages, the novel will captivate readers with its multifaceted and resonates with its multifaceted and illuminating observations on art, family, and the consequences of genius touched by madness.
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“I knew then that I’d been fooling myself, that none of it was Real at all. And I was what I’d always been, a rabbit with no fur, no hind legs, nothing more than a sewed-up sack of sawdust. I couldn’t move properly. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all.”
The Velveteen Rabbit is my all-time favorite children’s book. I’ve never seen or heard anything about the author – Margery Williams Bianco. I had no idea if she was married, had a family, where she lived… When I saw this title, I was thrilled at the idea of learning about her life and eager to see what (if any) role the eponymous daughter played in the creation of her fantastic book. I imagined whimsy and fun, a happy child learning beautiful lessons about life and love at the feet of a master.
Wow. I could not have been more surprised by the way this played out…
Turns out, Margery herself was just about exactly what I imagined. Technically I guess I should say Margery appeared just about exactly how I imagined. This is a novel. I expected some artistic license in the name of story development but, generally speaking (unless explicity stated otherwise) novels based on real people track real life wherever documentation is available, and the fiction part comes in through the gap-filling necessary to turn the historical record into a coherent tale. Still, I’ve done a bit of online investigating since this, and it appears that the presentation of the main characters is fairly as true to life as possible, given the available evidence. So I will talk as though it is.
As I was saying, Margery was a loving, caring, considerate mother – exactly the type of mother/woman I would have expected to come up with the tale of the Velveteen Rabbit. But her child – Pamela – could not have had a more different childhood than that I imagined for a child of Margery if she’d tried… I did not know Pamela existed, let alone that she was an artist – and a world-renowned child prodigy at that. That’s the source of the majority of the story in this story – Pamela’s greatness and fame at an early age, and the life she led as an adult in the aftermath of that unusual childhood.
As Tolstoy said: “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Had Pamela had the childhood I would have imagined for her, there would be no novel here – and maybe there’d be no Velveteen Rabbit either. Without Pamela’s struggles to balance her father’s expectations and her own need to create with her father Francesco’s desire to propel his exceedingly talented daughter to the heights of art world; without dealing on a daily basis with a daughter and husband who fought life-long battles with mental illness; and without her own attempts to balance these two volatile personalities with that of her more prosaic son Cecco – all while maintaining and expanding upon her own prolific career as an author – perhaps, without all of those elements, the simple elegance of the Rabbit’s quest for love, to be seen and be Real, would never have been written… That would have been a tragedy indeed.
But equally tragic are Pamela’s struggles to maintain a life of her own. She basically spent her life searching for her own Reality and love, her own third way between the towering vehemence of her father and the quieter, but no less powerful, quiet strength of her mother. The book was difficult to read at times. Children’s struggles should be difficult to read about, after all… And despite her mother’s undying love and support, there were times when the quietude of Margery’s nature meant she didn’t speak up or speak out to protect the fragility she recognized in her daughter. The back-and-forth narrative, shifting perspective between Margery and Pamela as well as shifting throughout the years of their lives, allows the regret to ring true in this regard. Those regrets – the doubts that every parent feels about the decisions made on behalf of their children – are some of the more touching moments in Margery’s segments of the story. For Pamela, those moments come when some aspect of her mother’s iconic story overlays her own depression and despair, as in the quote at the opening of this post.
This is a lovely, long-overdue look at an iconic children’s author – and an equally long-overdue revival for her exceptionally (and, perhaps, tragically) talented daughter.
My review copy was made available through NetGalley.
4.5 stars. A delightful novel, exquisitely well-written and well-researched, based on the true story of Margery, the author of the beloved children’s book “The Velveteen Rabbit”, and her daughter Pamela, who was a talented painter and a child prodigy. Told in short chapters alternating between the points of view of the mother and daughter, this novel pulls the reader into the story from the opening pages. The narrative unfolds in a series of flashbacks, a structure that the author skillfully uses to create tension; the reader understands from the opening page that “there is a madness in (Pamela’s) eyes”, and is compelled to discover what lies behind this, and what will happen to her. As the story unfolds, we see Margery’s inability to stand up for her young daughter in the face of her father’s unbridled ambition to promote her as a child prodigy on the world stage, Pamela’s heartbreak over an unrequited teenage love for an older man, her struggles with severe depression, and her loss of contact with the father of her child. The themes from the Velveteen Rabbit – what it means to be real and to be loved – are woven through this poignant story.
If you don’t enjoy flipping between points of view and hop-skipping about the timeline, don’t read this novel. Based on real people this novel is somewhat heavy and deteriorates as the characters age. The artist-genius daughter of the woman who wrote The Velveteen Daughter spends her whole life striving to be real with frequent bouts of depression/insanity which all seem rather vague as if enacted behind a veil. It left me sad and unsettled without feeling as if any progress was made by the characters or any wisdom was imparted to me. Still, I like learning about historical characters and found the title to be arresting and evocative.