The House at Riverton

"The House at Riverton" is the first novel written by Australian Kate Morton, published in the United Kingdom by Pan Macmillan in June 2007.

Author Biographical Information
Kate Morton was born 1976 in Berri, South Australia. She is an Australian author, who has enjoyed domestic and international success. She is the oldest of three sisters and her family is known for their constant moving before they settled on Tamborine Mountain in Australia. She attended a small country school there where she enjoyed reading books at an early age, her favorites were books by Enid Blyton. She completed a Licentiate in Speech & Drama from Trinity College London. She then attended a summer Shakespeare course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Later she received first-class honors for her literature degree at the University of Queensland. At this time she wrote too manuscripts that were never published before writing this novel, The House at Riverton. After writing this she earned a scholarship and completed a Master’s degree focusing on tragedy in Victorian literature. She soon married Davin, a jazz musician and composer, and they have 2 sons where they all live in the Brisbane suburb of Paddington. She is currently enrolled in a PhD program researching contemporary novels that marry elements of gothic and mystery fiction.

Setting: Historical Information
The setting of The House at Riverton is placed Riverton, South Australia. Riverton is a small town that is of interest to travelers and is known to have “character”. It is located mid North of South Australia, in the Gilbert Valley on the Gilbert River. It is named after the river and is recorded to have a population of 723 according to the 2006 census. Riverton was settled in 1865 close to the capital city Adelaide. The streets got their names from James Masters (somewhat settled Riverton) and his friends. They salute people notable in the history of the district or state.

Genre
The genre of drama is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as "The quality of being arresting or highly emotional”. This means that dramas tend to have high emotion and movement within the literary work. In The House at Riverton this is immensely true. Emotion is continued throughout this book and is never without it.

Plot Summary
The House at Riverton tells the story of Grace Bradley, 98, who was a maid at Riverton Manor during the 1920s. For years Grace has hidden a terrible secret. Now a film is being made about a famous incident at Riverton when a well-known poet, Robbie Hunter, shot himself. Grace is contacted by the director, Ursula, as the only surviving person from that night. Grace's memories are stirred up and she decides to make a tape for her grandson, Marcus, sharing her secret with him. As a young girl, Grace is sent to work at Riverton. She first meets the grandchildren of Riverton, David, Hannah and Emmeline, when they come to stay at Riverton. She immediately feels a connection with them, Hannah in particular. It is later revealed that Grace is a half-sibling to the children. Grace suspects Hannah knows this, but even after Grace deduces her parentage, she does not say anything to Hannah. It is one of many secrets in the novel. One Christmas, David brings home a school friend, Robbie Hunter. Eleven year-old Emmeline is infatuated, but 15 year-old Hannah is less impressed. Nearly ten years later, after David has been killed in WWI, Robbie finds Hannah to return a book she had given her brother. Hannah is living in London and unhappily married to an older businessmen; Robbie provides a glimpse of the life she wanted to have. They fall in love and begin an affair. Emmeline, who has grown into a beautiful woman and one of the Bright Young People, prefers London society and often stays with Hannah. She provides Robbie and Hannah the excuse they need to see each other, as Robbie ostensibly calls on Emmeline but is really slipping notes to Hannah with the locations and times for them to meet. Robbie is suffering shell-shock from the War and is deeply in love with Hannah. He wants them to run away and begin new lives together. She assists in planning their escape to appease him, but does not believe they can elope, and is further convinced when her husband announces his plans to relocate them back to Riverton. To celebrate the revival of Riverton, Hannah and her husband plan an extravagant midsummer gala. During the party Grace goes to her room and finds two letters from Hannah. The one addressed to her is in shorthand, which Hannah mistakenly believes Grace can read. It is another of the unspoken secrets of the novel. Grace opens the second letter addressed to Emmeline; it is a suicide note saying that Hannah will have drowned herself in the lake by the time the letter is read. Grace rushes to find Emmeline, and takes her down to the lake to see if they can stop Hannah. Emmeline has been drinking a lot and is wearing a friend's dinner jacket. At the lake they see Hannah who passes it off as a game when questioned. As Grace and Emmeline are about to head back to the house, Robbie emerges from the newly built summerhouse, carrying a suitcase. For a moment Emmeline thinks he has come to see her until Hannah explains that they are in love and are going to run away together. Emmeline becomes very jealous, pulls a handgun from the jacket pocket and threatens to shoot herself. Hannah wrestles the gun from her. Fireworks are going off all around them and each loud bang affects Robbie further, taking him back to his time in the trenches. He shouts at Hannah to shoot Emmeline before she ruins their plans. As both Emmeline and Robbie are rushing to her, at the last minute Hannah shoots Robbie to save her sister. Hearing people coming, Emmeline takes control, tells Grace to take Hannah's bags up to the house quickly and announces that Robbie has shot himself. The police find no suspicious circumstances and Emmeline returns to London where she continues to enjoy the high life until she is killed in a car accident. Hannah is depressed and distant. One day she asks Grace if she can really read shorthand, knowing the answer before Grace confirms that she can't. Hannah realizes she is pregnant, despite previous failures to conceive with her husband. There are complications during the birth and she dies. The baby, Florence, has Robbie's eyes, confirming her parentage to Hannah's husband and his family. Baby Florence is sent to live with Hannah's aunt in America. Some years later Grace learns what was in the shorthand letter from Hannah. It explained that she and Robbie were planning to run away together, but in order to do this she must fake her death hence the suicide note left for Emmeline. Grace was to give the letter to Emmeline after the party to give them chance to get away. Hannah was planning to send for Emmeline once they got themselves settled somewhere. Grace has carried this guilt throughout her life. Having finally told the truth via the tapes to her grandson, she is able to die in peace.

Characters

 * Grace Bradley - She is the protagonist of this novel. She is elderly, smart and tells the story of the Summer of 1924.
 * Robbie Hunter - He is the deceased poet of the novel. He is the main focus of this novel's plot. Some adjectives to describe him are loving and poetic.
 * Ursula - She is the director whom brings Grace's memories back of the Summer of 1924. Some adjectives to describe her are interested & leader.
 * Hannah Hartford - She is Riverton's grandchild whom we later find out to be the half-sibling of Grace. You can describe her with star-crossed-lover and depressed.
 * David Hartford - He is also Riverton's grandchild whom we later find out to be Grace's half-sibling. An adjective to describe him is immature.
 * Emmeline Hartford - She is Riverton's grandchild whom we later find out to be the half-sibling of Grace. She can be described as beautiful and smart.

Author's Style
Kate Morton’s style in The House at Riverton is very descriptive and tells the story in a great way. She never leaves out any concrete details nor details that are unnecessary for understanding what she is trying to say. In the quote “This was not a shiny new building Teddy had designed, but an old structure with ivy climbing the walls, twisting itself through the windows, strangling the pillars” (Morton 13). Like I previously stated Morton uses the style of “descriptive description”. This quote just proves this by how she describes how the ivy wraps around the building into the windows.

Setting
The setting of this book is very conflicting. The book begins in the winter of 1999. A young director visits her in her home about a young poets suicide, because he plans to create a movie. This causes the book to flashback to a moment in the protagonist’s life. This moment is the summer of 1924 when Grace Bradley, the novels protagonist, is working as a housemaid in Riverton Manor and a young poet takes his life.

Themes

 * The truth will set you free - This theme is shown when Grace can't pass on to Heaven until she removes the burden of guilt from her chest.
 * Love can be found anywhere - This theme is experienced when Hannah and Robbie fall in love.

Motifs
A motif of this novel our the letters that Hannah writes to Grace and Emmeline. These letters appear numerous times towards the end of this novel.

Symbols
Memories - This is an abstract memory because this memories cause many things to happen, good and bad. For example, Grace’s memory of Robbie’s death helped her to die peacefully.

Significance of the Opening/Closing Scenes
- Significance of the Opening Scene: The opening scene helped us to understand that the book would flashback often to answer many questions that Grace needed to know for herself as well for Ursula, the movie director. A major question was answered that helped her die peacefully. This was Did Robbie Hunter really commit suicide?

- Significance of the Closing Scene: The closing scene helped the reader understand why Grace could not pass on. She could not pass on, because she carried the guilt of Hannah and Robbie going to run away together. Her actions stopped this, ended a life, and made another life miserable. Having finally told the truth to her grandson threw tapes she could finally rest in peace.

Memorable Quotes
-Last November I had a nightmare. It was 1923 and I was at Riverton again.”(Morton 3) This quote is significant, because it shows how long ago the incident occurred and how far back Grace has to flashback.

-“But although I had been met with such memories before, Ursula's letter was different. It was the first time in over seventy years that anyone had associated me with the events, had remembered that a young woman named Grace Reeves had been at Riverton that summer. It made me feel vulnerable somehow, singled out. Guilty.” (Morton19-20) This quote is significant, because it shows how Grace dreads and appreciates being remembered back when she spent the summers in the town of Riverton.

-“A rising star of the English poetry scene kills himself by a dark lake on the eve of a huge society party. His only witness’ are two beautiful sisters who never speak to each other again. One his fiancée, the other rumored to be his lover. It's terribly romantic.” (Morton 14) This quote is significant, because it tells the background of the worse night in Riverton. Without it the readers of this novel would be lost and confused about what happened while Grace was a child.

Reviews
I probably would have enjoyed Kate Morton's debut novel The House at Riverton more if I had not already experienced the greater expression of her writing talent in The Forgotten Garden. Riverton shares many of the themes of her later work, but with the narrator at a greater remove from the focus of the story, it tends to make her characterizations a bit flat. The story of the Hartford family, focused on the sisters Hannah and Emmeline are told by Grace, a servant to the family for many years. An enjoyable story and a beautiful historical setting marred by clumsy story telling, overbearing foreshadowing, and an emotional disconnect with characters. I had such high hopes! Our heroine, Grace, now a feisty but failing 98, spent her early life at Riverton House in the service of the Ashbury family...and then spent her adult life trying to forget about them. However, she's contacted by a filmmaker about the mysterious suicide of a World War I poet that occurred at the estate back in 1924. Is the set of the Riverton drawing room accurate? What was it like being a housemaid? Does Grace have any insight into the circumstances of the suicide? Why did the two Ashbury sisters never speak to each other again after the suicide? Grace may get sucked into remembering, but not necessarily into telling. For me this is the stuff of dreams...an English country manor, mysterious death, World War I...it should be a slam dunk! Alas, it’s more like a shot that rolls around the rim for a while before someone else taps it in.
 * Elizabeth:
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 * Laura: