One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening.
Having things out with her father is a very big deal for Ann Veronica Stanley. She has become victimized by his overprotectiveness and the result is—as is so often the case—an ironic outcome for the one trying to protect. Ann’s sense of rebellion and desire to know what the big world has to offer out there has only grown under the authoritarian thumb of her father’s desire to shield. As the narrator goes on to assert, this showdown is the point origination for the story because Ann’s story really “begins with her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.”
January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory of the Central Imperial College that towers up from among the back streets in the angle between Euston Road and Great Portland Street. She was working very steadily at the Advanced Course in Comparative Anatomy.
Ann’s decision to bring things to a head with her father pays off and quickly. It is quite the leap from overprotected daughter to studying anatomy, to be sure. Biological functionality plays a crucial role in the novel just on this literal level, but more broadly in the thematic sense. The fascination with biology touches upon gender issues within the background of England’s suffragette movement as well as in the leading suffragette of the story recognizing the effects upon biological development wrought by consuming meat.
From the first, Ann Veronica found him an exceptionally interesting man. To begin with, he struck her as being the most variable person she had ever encountered. At times he was brilliant and masterful, talked round and over every one, and would have been domineering if he had not been extraordinarily kindly; at times he was almost monosyllabic.
Biological functioning is also integrated into the plot on a more immediate level. Ann’s favorite instructor leads her to some thinking about comparative anatomy lessons that are not on the official synopsis. Only one problem: he’s already got a biological tie to another and, worse, that tie presents a problem based on more legal issues. Even worse: the damage to his marriage was caused by an affair which has already put a stain on his reputation. Nevertheless, despite proper society’s best efforts under allegedly good intentions, biological studies win out over legal studies and a happy ending is in place for Ann and Mr. Capes, the man so described above.
"To think that is my father! Oh, my dear! He stood over me like a cliff; the thought of him nearly turned me aside from everything we have done. He was the social order; he was law and wisdom. And they come here, and they look at our furniture to see if it is good; and they are not glad, it does not stir them, that at last, at last we can dare to have children."
It is nearly over. Ann and her father have reconciled to at least a point. He, she and her husband are all in agreement on her father’s pronouncement of the situation: “All’s well that ends well and the less one says about things the better.” The road from rebellion to a dinner party has been a long and rocky and as Ann speaks of “everything we have done” it is almost inevitable that many readers if not the larger majority of them will look at her in this moment and wonder just how far she really traveled. And what has she done. A story that starts off with the bang of an insurrection promises to lead to revolution, but the final images are not of revolutionary change at all. Instead, she seems a rather convention woman who is even obsessing over her biological clock. What is one to glean from this seemingly short path from point A to point B?
