Mason's Retreat (1995) by Chistopher Tilghman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mason's Retreat (1995)

by Christopher Tilghman

Chesapeake, Maryland

Maryland: 8/9

  Ready to wrap up Maryland!  Mason's Retreat is an example a rare but important genre in the 1,001 Novels project, a volume from a multi-volume multi-generational family history series.  This family is the Mason family, owners of a southern-style plantation in Maryland, of all places.  I was frankly unaware of this part of Maryland despite spending my college years in Washington DC, but it is out there.  It's a decidedly coastal location with much of the transit in this book taking place via boat, in a manner similar to the Maine coast, with folks popping by for visits on their sailboats and what not. 

  This volume is the first of four- each with a different time period and cast of characters.  Here, the Mason's are not the Mason's at all but a cadet branch who have inherited the plantation, called Mason's Retreat, after the death of a maiden aunt, the previous occupant.  The time is the great depression, and the inheritor, Edward Mason, is at the end of his financial rope after his airplane parts factory in Manchester UK is put to the rack during the Great Depression.  Mason and his wife, Edith (the protagonist) are both American but relocated to the UK as wealthy people did back then.  No one is particularly excited about relocating to a run-down plantation house, but hey, life could be worse, right?

  Once they make it to Maryland they meet the house staff- it never gets brought up in Mason's Retreat, but this is the same general area where Frederick Douglass was born a slave (and escaped).  Race kind of simmers beneath the surface but despite the inclusion of some black characters the author is mostly concerned with Edith.   They've hardly settled in to plantation life when Hitler emerges, followed by renewed interest on the part of the British Government in manufacturing more airplanes, and Edith is left to her own devices.  Her own devices being a lusty affair with a neighbor- class and race appropriate, thank heavens.

  Mason's Retreat was another title from the 1,001 Novels project that was great because it focuses on this specific place- but the humans in the book are less memorable than the plantation itself.