Summary
Raised in the seventies by her mother Winsome and father Clovis, Shirley grows up with two brothers. Watching her brothers eat bigger helpings of food that they didn’t help prepare and make messes that they didn’t have to clean, Shirley feels a subtle resentment towards her parents. Even with the perceived family favoritism toward the sons, Shirley’s career is the most promising—she receives a degree in education while her brothers settle into trades right after grammar school.
Shirley is mentioned in passing as Amma’s childhood best friend as early on as the first chapter, and unbeknownst to the reader, she also makes appearances in two other characters’ lives—those of Carole and LaTisha—as the tyrannical schoolteacher Mrs. King. In the vignette on Shirley’s life, these two seemingly disparate pieces come together, and we realize that the “goody-two-shoes,” idealistic Shirley Coleman becomes a jaded and tough Mrs. Shirley King over the years.
One of the reasons for this change in Shirley’s character is a series of educational reform policies created by the British government. Restricted by lesson plans and generic rubrics, Shirley can no longer teach and inspire Peckham students the way she used to, and further, these policies seem to have made students less engaged academically—she sees more violence, assault, and teenage pregnancy as a result of them. Shirley becomes more and more frustrated at the inefficiencies of this system, eventually becoming the jaded and grouchy Mrs. King, who handpicks a select handful of promising students to mentor and seems to hate all the other students—the very same Mrs. King experienced by Carole as a mentor and LaTisha as “Fuck Face.”
Winsome
Many of Shirley’s more conservative beliefs seem to have stemmed from her mother, Winsome, who instructed her to dress blandly (unlike the eccentric Amma), not attract attention, and definitely not be gay (again, unlike Amma). We later discover that these beliefs were deeply ingrained into Winsome by her own parents, and by the society they lived in, where women were to obey their fathers and husbands. Winsome tends to discount Shirley’s achievements and struggles, and even holds a certain resentment or jealousy towards her daughter, who in her eyes, has everything that she never had growing up—an education, a job, a “hunky” husband, and two daughters.
Unlike Shirley, Winsome worked on an open Routemaster bus every day, subject to wind, rain, and hail. Her husband Clovis was a bus driver. The two met in the fifties, having both recently emigrated from Barbados to the UK, and Winsome agrees to marry Clovis (despite not finding him very attractive) because he treats her kindly. The two work for decades, migrating from London to various small towns for work. In many of these small towns, the couple faces blatant racial discrimination. They eventually have three children together—Tony, Errol, and Shirley—and move back to London. With their life savings, Clovis and Winsome buy a house in the city, where they raise their family.
When Shirley brings her fiancé, Lennox, home, Winsome is instantly and deeply sexually attracted to him. The two have an affair that continues for a year, but which Lennox ends abruptly, with no explanation. When Clovis and Winsome retire, they sell their London home and return to Barbados, where Shirley and her family visit on vacation once a year.
Penelope is the haughty but deeply insecure, adopted child of Edwin and Margaret, two white, working-class Brits. The couple is traditional, with Edwin working and Margaret staying at home as a housewife to raise children. However, to the dismay of the newly married Edwin and Margaret, they are unable to produce biological children. Instead, they adopt Penelope, who was abandoned on the doorstep of a church as an infant.
The two are already stolid parents who don’t show much affection, so when they reveal to Penelope that she is adopted, the adolescent girl feels even more unwanted and rejected. As such, Penelope dreams of going to college to become a teacher and having children herself, to give them the love that she didn’t feel from her own parents. She soon meets Giles, an 18-year-old popular boy at the grammar school they attend. She graduates from a teacher’s college, and he becomes an engineer, and they soon marry. The couple move to London, and she quickly falls pregnant with her first son, and soon after, a daughter, which puts an end to her teaching career. Penelope’s married life is perfect at first, but a rift begins to grow as she becomes more and more entrenched in the domestic sphere, and Giles in his career. When their two children are older, she wants to enter the workforce, but her husband stops her.
As the two grow apart, Penelope discovers Betty Friedan’s feminist work, The Feminine Mystique, and is determined to return to work. In return, Giles refuses adamantly, and the two divorce. She soon meets her second husband, Phillip, and begins to work at Peckham, the same school that Shirley will come to years later. Marriage with Philip also turns sour, but the two remain together to preserve their image. Finally, when Penelope’s two children are grown up, Phillip and Penelope separate. She becomes lonely and unhappy, and finds joy only in companionship with former schoolmates and her daughter, Sarah.
Penelope has ties to two other characters from Girl, Woman, Other. After her separation from Phillip, Penelope hires Bummi to be a housekeeper, and she also meets Shirley when the latter begins working at Peckham. While Shirley and Penelope have a strained relationship at first, the two become “work friends” when Shirley also becomes jaded and skeptical.
Later, in the Epilogue, we learn that Penelope has finally found a stable late-life relationship with a man name Jeremy, a relationship that lacks the passion of her marriage to Philip but provides comfort and stability.
Analysis
Marriage is a key theme that ties together the characters of Chapter 3. For the most part, these characters hail from different generations and have completely different upbringings from each other, but each woman's tale centrally revolves around the finding of (and in Penelope's case, the losing of) romantic partners for marriage.
In Shirley's case, Lennox is the man of her dreams—respectful, intelligent, and responsible. To complicate things, Lennox is also the man of her mother's dreams, though Winsome has a husband of her own, Clovis. Both the mother's and the daughter's tales fundamentally revolve around their decisions to marry their husbands and the marital life that follows. In particular, Winsome's story involves regret at having "stupidly" rushed into marrying Clovis and subsequently having to move around to rural English towns. Penelope's story also revolves around her two husbands and eventually, when those two marriages end, her long-term partner. Specifically, Penelope has both great joys and tumultuous conflicts with both husbands that allow her to ultimately reach a place where she can hold a steady relationship that provides much-needed companionship in her old age.
Despite the differences in each character—Penelope is a white woman raised middle-class who marries into wealth and unwittingly into becoming a housewife, Winsome is a black, working-class mother who continues working while she raises three children, and Shirley has a middle-class upbringing that allows her to earn a degree in education and become schoolteacher—all their lives are made both more joyful and comfortable as well as more difficult or tumultuous by marriage.
Let's begin with Penelope's first marriage to Giles. Though Giles is handsome, charming, and provides a large and comfortable home with his salary as an engineer, his adamance that Penelope not join the workforce leads to conflict that ends their marriage. The marriage dissolves, but leaves Penelope with many positives in life, including two children, a big house, and a newfound desire to work. Then comes Phillip, who supports Penelope's career and shows her a newfound sexual side of herself, but whose habit of uninvited psychoanalysis begins to grate on Penelope.
Then, we have Winsome's marriage to Clovis. Though Winsome is not wildly attracted to nor comfortably supported by Clovis, he provides her with needed companionship, care, and a shared identity at a time when she feels scared as a new immigrant to the UK. Even in retirement, Clovis continues to provide this sort of companionship, but lacking passion in the relationship, Winsome seeks out an affair with Lennox.
Shirley's marriage to Lennox appears perfect on paper (and in Shirley's own mind), but clearly, cracks exist in the relationship: why else would her husband seek out a relationship with her mother? Why else would she herself observe that he seems to have no emotional outlet other than watching football? In the cases of all these distinct women, love and marriage cause both great joy and distress, and ultimately define a large portion of their lives.
