SOURCE: “Unhappy Families,” in Spectator, April 13, 1985, pp. 30–1.

In the following mixed review, Waugh unfavorably compares Mantel's Every Day Is Mother's Day to Patricia Angadi's novel The Governess.

Patricia Angadi and Hilary Mantel are both talented, first-time novelists. In Mrs Angadi's book, The Governess, there is an ease and maturity that is lacking in Every Day Is Mother's Day—which is hardly surprising, as Mrs Angadi has waited until her seventieth year before taking the plunge into print. She might well have drawers full of less considerable stuff such as conventionally makes up the babblings of most novelists’ first printed efforts.

The Governess, set just after the First World War, shows a middle-class family in disintegration. Why it disintegrates is the haunting question left unsettled by the novel. The story opens with the hiring of a governess by Eleanor Lane-Baker. Miss Herring is to take charge of a pair...