The Children Act

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, illness, death by suicide, and death.

Through Fiona Mayes’s story, The Children Act explores the complexities that sometimes arise from the intersection of one’s personal and professional lives, questioning whether keeping the two separate is even possible. As a High Court judge in the Family Division, Fiona has devoted her life to her judicial career. She has put professional advancement before her home and family life. While she loves her husband Jack, she has chosen not to have children in order to establish herself in the legal world. As she puts it, ever since she was “sworn in by the Lord Chief Justice and took her oath of allegiance and her Judicial Oath before two hundred of her bewigged colleagues,” she has “belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ” (49). This analogy implies that Fiona has put off traditional notions of femininity, womanhood, and maternity for the sake of her profession. She prioritizes her vocation over her marriage and home, actively setting aside personal engagements and dramas in order to establish what she believes is a healthy barrier between her personal and professional spheres. With Fiona’s attitude, the novel explores whether it is possible or healthy to keep the two realms separate by highlighting the effects of her decisions on both areas of her life. 

When Jack broaches the subject of their dormant sex life and suggests having an extramarital affair, the careful separation between work and home that Fiona has achieved is threatened. Fiona feels as if her personal conflicts are intruding upon her vocational stability. When she tries “to imagine wanting something like [Jack’s affair] for herself,” she can “think only of disruption, assignations, disappointment, ill-timed phone calls. The sticky business of learning to be with someone new in bed” feels not only false to her, but silly in light of her professional responsibilities (8). Her dismissive regard for sex and romance reveals how little attention Fiona has paid to her personal life over the past decades. She is irritated and upset by Jack’s marital frustrations because she perceives her home life as a static realm she shouldn’t have to invest in. Her and Jack’s marital conflict forces her personal and professional spheres to intersect, illustrated by the fact that, in the wake of their argument, Fiona becomes preoccupied by her relationship while she’s at work. She repeatedly checks her phone and email for messages from Jack. The narrator also repeatedly alludes to Fiona’s restless state of mind and her consistent attempts to dismiss thoughts of Jack with work matters.

Fiona’s changing state of mind reveals the true source of her desperation to compartmentalize her personal and professional life. She doesn’t want her judicial work to reflect on her personal identity, and she doesn’t want her personal identity to impact her judicial obligations. She fears that if these two versions of herself intersect, she will compromise both who she is as a judge and who she is as a woman. However, Fiona’s story reveals that the individual’s personal and professional selves are part of the same whole. At the novel’s end, Fiona is forced to reconcile these seemingly competing realms and identities in order to face her true self. In the final pages of the novel, she finally resolves this tension. As she lies in bed with her husband and tells him the story of Adam Henry’s case, the two spheres of her life are combined, and she is able to gain closure on the turmoil that has characterized both throughout the novel. Her sense of relief illustrates the novel’s argument that for one to experience true fulfillment in the professional and personal spheres of one’s life, they must be fully integrated with each other.