Molly & the Captain is a tale in three parts, skipping through the centuries from the 1780s to the 1980s. The sections are loosely connected by one fictional portrait: The Merrymount Sisters at Night by William Merrymount, a Gainsborough-esque artist in Georgian Marylebone. The Gainsborough references are frequent and unabashed, “Molly” and “The Captain” being his nicknames for the two cherished daughters he often painted, just as the fictional Merrymount paints his. Laura Merrymount, the elder daughter and “Captain” of this piece, is our first narrator. Although her father encourages her artistic talent she is trapped in his shadow, and the exhibition he persuades her to put on flops. “As a girl I was thought to be fond of Dominion,” she explains in regards to her nickname, but by her mid-30s, disappointed by life and love, she has cast ambition aside.
Anthony Quinn is an attentive author of late 18th-century life, and hits all the expected notes: trips to Bath, dissolute suitors, laudanum. His Lizzie Vavasor, the glamorous actor who befriends Laura, is nicely evocative of real contemporaries such as Dorothea Jordan, while Laura’s narrative is peppered with pleasing Georgian-isms – “chuse”, “partickular”, and best of all “landskips” (for “landscapes”).
