Me and My Mother and The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
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“Dickens lite,” my mom said dismissively after I demanded (as only a firstborn can) that she read Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock. Read it! READ IT, MOMMY!
I about cried when she told me she was not charmed by it. “But, Mom,” I said, “Mermaids are charming! It is an indisputable fact!” “Sure,” she replied, “But not that one.”
I stuck out my lip like a sulky toddler. Was it happening? Mommy and me…were finally parting reading pathways? We were past time, I guess, since I am in my middle…okay, fine, late 40s and she is in her 70s. However, for decades we have loved the same smells-of-Jane-Austen sci-fi and fantasy books like Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton and the series Dragonriders of Pern.
“Set in 1785, Jonah Hancock, a merchant, sells his ship for a mermaid.” I had been enchanted and ensorcelled by The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, reading it in three days over my kids’ winter vacation, indeed wrapped a blue-green mermaid blanket.
“That mermaid is scary,” she said. “It made me terribly sad.” “YAAAS, qweeen,” I said. That’s why I loved the book, and she disliked it. She wanted a mermaid Baby Boomer style, all good hair, singing, “roll up, roll up a great wonder is on display.”
I’m Gen X, man. I’m like, Give me melancholy! More gruel, sir. Give me, as Gowar describes her mermaid, a “great voluptuous sorrow rolling over…” “so vast and glinting was she.”
Mermaids In Literature
The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock failed to charm my mom—who, if anyone is stuck in the 18th-century, it is her, with her interest in fabrics of that period. The cover art for the book “was created by layering two eighteenth-century silks,” I told her. To no avail!
“That mermaid is scary,” she said. “It made me terribly sad.” “YAAAS, qweeen,” I said. That’s why I loved the book, and she disliked it. She wanted a mermaid Baby Boomer style, all good hair, singing, “roll up, roll up a great wonder is on display.”
I’m Gen X, man. I’m like, Give me melancholy! More gruel, sir. Give me, as Gowar describes her mermaid, a “great voluptuous sorrow rolling over…” “so vast and glinting was she.”
