The girls got their own room, as per their mother’s plan. Mother had set money aside, without telling father, to furnish the girls’ room. She put two new sets of desks and chairs by the sunny window and a new closet and bookcase by one wall, and gave them each a new sleeping mat, blanket
It is easy to mourn the live we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular […]. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It
The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate:
She [Sachiko] was sometimes startled at the thought that she spent more time worrying about her sisters than about her husband and her daughter, but they were like daughters—they were on a level with Etsuko in her affections, and at the same time they were her only friends. Left alone, she was surprised to note