This moving and delightful novel, first published in 1933, examines the "great enterprises" to which Renaissance writer Frances Bacon claimed that wife and children are "impediments", writes Graham Anderson.

The title is from Bacon: "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune".

Cambridge is the pen-name of Barbara Hodges, who for many years lived in Deddington, wife of a country doctor and mother of three children. Her hostages to fortune share a similar experience.

Catherine, the mother, gives birth to her first daughter Audrey in 1915. The hitherto unreflecting Catherine is shocked by this vivid new arrival. "It stared at life with bright, unwinking eyes. Its underlip was thrust out, tremulous, indignant. 'My word,' Catherine thought. 'That's not a baby. It's a person'."

And so begins the long march of motherhood, a march in which the five members of the family (two sons soon follow Audrey) seem rarely to keep in step, have no all-embracing sense of direction, yet somehow create, over the following 18 years, a set of relationships and loyalties that is itself a great enterprise.

Her individuality, before it has had time to develop its own distinct colours, is mixed, overlaid, shadowed, altered and in the end effectively re-created by the experience of motherhood. Catherine is a marvellous character, a woman watching the kaleidoscope of her own life expanding and reforming before her mystified gaze.

She is enriched but overwhelmed. She is the manager, the thread-holder and string-puller of all these lives, without ever feeling that she wields any real control.

By the end, Catherine has given up most of what were once her own ambitions for personal fulfilment.

In a poignant conclusion, she is able to find contentment only by abandoning the notion that it is within a mother's capacity to guarantee her children happiness.

Persephone Books specialises in beautiful reprints of early 20th-century works, mostly by women -- niche marketing, but this male reviewer has no intention of being left out. Persephone's product is more than a book: it is an elegantly-dressed friend and companion.