By the time you finish Art Hour at The Duchess Hotel you will be able to say what type of perfume each character wears and what they like to eat for dinner. Perfume is not mentioned in the book, and dinner rarely is, but the strength of Sophie Green’s writing lies in her ability to bring the characters to life in such a way that you can picture every detail of their day, and imagine them carrying on their lives long after you’ve closed the book.
Joan, whose flight from her stifling marriage to a seaside hotel is the spark that kicks off the book, likely spent her married years wearing something like White Linen by Elizabeth Arden: conservative and up-market but not lavish. Following her emancipation, she would have stopped wearing perfume altogether, unless she had a bottle of something obscure and French tucked away from her youth, which she spent swept up in creating art.
Art Hour at The Duchess Hotel is a relationship-driven story of four women who come together at a stately hotel on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Sophie has a reputation for writing stories set in small communities, where women confronting different crises bond over a shared interest. The flashpoints in their lives are opportunities for Sophie to explore social issues. In The Duchess Hotel, these include blended families, parental guilt and women reclaiming their independence and individuality, among others.
At the hotel, Joan meets Frances (no perfume, meat and three veg for dinner) who yearns for the wild outdoors of her youth and has a complicated relationship with both of her children: Keith who frittered away all the family money, and Alison, who shows her love by fussing over Frances in a manner Frances finds suffocating.
Alison, who just wants the best for her mother, is contending with the arrival of her troubled stepson in her harmonious home.
Rounding out the quartet is Kirrily, who works at The Duchess to stay on top of the household bills and is grappling with an intrusive crush she has developed on a guest who looks like a young Paul Newman. (Kirrily wears Daisy by Marc Jacobs. It’s young and pretty and was given to her as a gift – she can’t afford to spend money on herself.)
As Joan rediscovers herself through painting and sketching, others are drawn to her, and her art, which helps her lower her defences.
It is through Joan, and her relationship with her lawyer husband, Isaac, that Sophie cracks open her central theme of female emancipation and delivers some of her sharpest observations. “She wishes he would talk to her as a person, not as an aggregate of services,” she writes of the way Joan feels about her husband’s demands.
Each character, in their own way, is grappling with how the exist in the world. Together, they are struggling to find a balance between their obligations, the demands others place on them, and their own wild needs and desires.
In Art Hour at The Duchess Hotel, Sophie has created an inviting community that beckons you to not only visit, but to linger, and enjoy the company of four fine women.
Buy Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel here and read our interview with author Sophie Green here.
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