And so Daphne has sucked me in with a plot that seems to be a riddle. It's mysterious without being a mystery. "The Loving Spirit" is divided into four parts -- and I finished the first a couple of days ago. It's devoted to Janet Coombe, begins with her marriage and ends with her death. Her whole life seems to have been one long haunting of herself. She lives one life but is haunted by another. We find that the other life actually belongs to her son Joseph, who is in multiple ways an extension of Janet. He is the male version of her, the other half of her soul -- you might even say her soul mate, in the non-romantic sense. I have read that some mediums believe your soul mate does not always come to you in the form of a lover, but may serve different roles in different lifetimes -- parent, sibling, friend, stranger. It might be nonsense, but it's a perfectly acceptable theory in the literary world. "It was like a union of spirit defying time and eternity -- something that had existed between them before birth, before their physical conception of each other" (p. 67).
Janet's life revolves around three significant moments -- the night Joseph was conceived, the night he was born, and the day he became captain of the ship bearing her likeness and name. Most of her sons were boat builders along with their father, but Joseph was the sailor. As a man, he is able to live the life Janet could only dream of - "he was her second self." Joseph tells Janet that a woman is like a ship: "She'd run like a devil if I let her, laughin' with the joy of escape, but a touch of my hand an' she'd understand, obeyin' my will, recognizin' I was her master an' lovin' me for it" (p. 71). Their relationship is atypical and they both realize it, as they spend their days pining for one another's affection. Daphne manages to throw some humor into it, describing how as a child Joseph fainted after watching his mother successfully scale a rocky coastline and fearing for her life.
Ironically this intense devotion contributes to Janet's demise. After years of physical and emotional strain related to watching her son set sail and return, set sail and return, yearning so hard when apart and loving so hard when reunited, her body can take no more. "Instead of calming her and soothing her, his presence acted like a drug that fortifies for the instant, creating an impression of renewed vigour and strength, but leaves its patient weaker than before" (p. 103). While he was gone, she had functioned like "some mechanical being" (p. 86) but held onto thoughts that life was more than the present moment. "Perhaps there was no end to a living moment, and even now her young self slept secure in the arms of Thomas, on some other plane of time, like the undying ripple on the surface of still water" (p. 90).
Those last two quotes, combined with the scene in which the ghost of adult Joseph appears to her on a night before he is even conceived, show Daphne's first stirrings of "stories of intrigue" to come. She's only writing her first novel but already more than dabbling in the supernatural. In "Myself When Young," she writes of confidence and trepidation associated with writing this book. She wants every word, every sentence to count, but she gets nervous that it's all garbage. But of course the novel was meant to be, inspired by the Jane Slade boat and a vision of Daphne's own: "I walked up to the Castle point, and it seemed to me that I was standing on the cliffs years hence, with a grown-up son, but of course I was only a ghost, being long dead, existing only in his thoughts (p. 154).
Daphne includes a bit from a letter describing her planning of the novel: "And always, no matter what people say to me, there must be Truth. No striving after cleverness, nor cheap and ready-made wit. Sincerity--beauty--purity" (p. 168).
