46 pages • 1-hour read
Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame
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Themes
The Connection Between Food, Memory, and Love
Throughout Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame, protagonist Jenny Quinn uses baking to communicate her love for the people in her life. The novel suggests that food has the power to convey love to people in the present and across time.
One of the most prominent examples of this theme, Jenny’s tiffin recipe, features in both the Prologue and the Epilogue. In the Prologue, teenage Jenny copies the recipe for her father’s tiffin, a British no-bake dessert, into a book she plans to give to her unborn child. She fantasizes about watching this child “sinking their teeth into her father’s tiffin, just as she had done” (2). The passage suggests that, for Jenny, sharing the tiffin recipe with the son she will never know is an act of love equal to her father sharing the tiffin itself with her every year at Christmas. Jenny is separated from her son William weeks after his birth, but in the Epilogue, they are reunited by that same tiffin recipe. William’s son Andrew, who “had used the recipe book as a child” (362), recognized both the tiffin recipe and the name Jenny, attached to another recipe in the book, and realized that Jenny Quinn may be his father’s birth mother. This revelation leads to Jenny and William being reunited by the tiffin recipe, which communicated her love for her son, just as she had hoped. With these significant scenes bookending the novel, author Olivia Ford suggests that food is intrinsically connected to love.
The novel also suggests that food has the power to trigger memories of the past and ensure the baker herself stays in people’s memories in the future. In her interviews for Britain Bakes, Jenny explicitly identifies baking as a way of connecting with the past. She describes it as “the strongest connection to the past” that she has (9), and she argues that “when I follow the instructions it’s a memory as well as a bake” (71). Because many of Jenny’s family recipes “have outlived the dear people that wrote them” (71), baking is the only way she can connect with the people she has lost, like her parents. Jenny also sees baking as a way that she can be remembered by others in the future. In her application for Britain Bakes, she writes that although she worries, “[I] might be leaving nothing behind when the day comes […] I do hope to leave behind my recipes” (72). For Jenny, baking is a way to both ensure her posterity and reconnect with people she has lost. With this multi-faceted view of the impact of baking in the lives of Jenny and her loved ones, Ford highlights the deep connection between food, memory, and love.
The Importance of Intergenerational Relationships
Although the protagonist of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame is 77 years old, many of the most important people in her life are younger. The novel offers many positive examples of intergenerational family groups and suggests that these relationships have benefits for young and old.
Through Jenny and Bernard’s relationships with young relatives, the novel illustrates the important role that older people can play in the lives of the young. Jenny and Bernard have an important relationship with their niece Rose, daughter of Bernard’s late sister Margot, and spend time with her family throughout the novel. The novel suggests that Rose’s children, Max and Poppy, love Bernard because he “spoke to them as if they were his peers,” and “never put on the patronizing voice of feigned enthusiasm […] but instead listened to them with the same integrity he would give to any adult” (26). The novel suggests that having adults treat Max and Poppy with respect and integrity is essential to their self-esteem and personal growth, and that their relationship with their great-aunt and great-uncle provides a needed boost.
The novel also suggests that Bernard and Jenny benefit from spending time with their young family members. Jenny believes that Bernard “thrived as part of a pack” (34), and she notices that he is more energetic when spending time with Max and Poppy. Decades earlier, Jenny and Bernard took Rose camping during the summers “to give Margot and John a break, but more than anything because they enjoyed it” (34). These episodes suggest that Jenny and Bernard’s relationships with Rose, Max, and Poppy have brought joy and energy throughout their lives. Their relationship with Rose and her family also allows them to connect with Margot after her death. Bernard tells their friends that when he looks at Poppy, “[he] see[s] […] [his] sister” (99). Jenny and Bernard benefit from their intergenerational relationships as much as their younger relatives.
The novel ends with three intergenerational family gatherings celebrating key moments for Jenny and Bernard, reflecting Ford’s argument for the importance of these types of relationships. Jenny and Bernard’s celebrations for both the Britain Bakes premiere and their 60th wedding anniversary include biological family, like Rose and her family, and chosen family, like Azeez and his partner Ashley. Later, Jenny and Bernard are invited to meet Jenny’s son William at a gathering that includes William’s adult son Andrew and his young children, suggesting that his family also values intergenerational gatherings. Strong intergenerational relationships are threaded throughout the narrative, reflecting the novel’s assertion of the importance of these connections to people of all ages.
Mistreatment of Pregnant Women and Girls in the 20th Century
Although Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame seems to be a simple cozy novel about a baking show, the flashbacks detailing Jenny Quinn’s teenage pregnancy reflect a deeper interest in the mistreatment of pregnant women and girls in the mid-20th century.
Ford offers Jenny’s own story as an example of the discrimination and treatment faced by unmarried pregnant girls and women. At 16, Jenny is coerced into a sexual relationship she doesn’t understand. Although she believes herself to be in love with Ray, the father of her baby, the novel suggests that the relationship was coercive. Not only is Ray “much older than her, almost thirty when she was just sixteen” (91), but he is also the son of her employer. The novel highlights how Ray pursued Jenny relentlessly: “[F]rom the first time she met him, his attention was like a searchlight, his eyes following her as she worked” (93). The novel’s framing of his attention suggests that Jenny may have felt pressured into a relationship with Ray, fearing retribution at work if she rejected him.
Beyond the unbalanced and coercive nature of Jenny’s relationship with Ray, the novel also highlights her youth and inexperience with the technical aspects and ramifications of sex. Regardless of her feelings for Ray, the novel is clear that she doesn’t understand the mechanics of pregnancy when they begin a sexual relationship. When a doctor asks if she is pregnant, Jenny immediately says that she “hadn’t thought [she] could be” (154). She struggles to explain the details to the doctor, saying simply that Ray “said it would be okay” (154). Jenny’s naïve acceptance of Ray’s promise that “it would be all right” indicates that she was not emotionally prepared to enter a relationship with an adult man (170).
Despite the fact that her relationship with Ray was coercive, Jenny is shamed and mistreated by medical practitioners and staff throughout her pregnancy. The doctor who tells Jenny she is pregnant gave her a “cold stare” after he “glimpsed her left hand” and realized she was unmarried (155, 154), causing “a shiver [that] ran the length of her spine” (155). The doctor’s cold attitude reflects the widespread social stigma against unmarried mothers in the mid-20th century. This attitude continues at the mother and baby home, which is supposed to be a sanctuary for girls like Jenny. On arrival, she is greeted by a woman “wearing an inconvenienced expression” who “snapped” her instructions and walked with “footsteps […] heavy with irritation” (218, 219). This anonymous nurse embodies the stigma against young mothers, expressing her disapproval through her words, tone, and physical posture. As a representative of the mother and baby home system, she reflects the systemic mistreatment of pregnant people in the mid-20th century. Through Jenny’s flashbacks throughout the novel, Ford illustrates the cruelty of such treatment, and with Jenny’s recurrent focus on these memories in the present, shows how the ramifications of this treatment resonate throughout her life.
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