The House at Riverton

Kate Morton’s The House at Riverton explores memory as an intensely personal expression of identity and emotional state, reflective of inner turmoil, repression, or acceptance in relation to past experiences. Through the narrative arc of 98-year-old Grace Bradley, the novel suggests that embracing repressed and painful memories, perhaps especially toward the end of life, can provide meaningful emotional resolution and even allow people to preserve their own legacy.

The novel’s frame narrative, which alternates between Grace’s perspective as an old woman and her memories as a young servant, establishes memory as potentially unstable and often involuntary force. Having spent “a lifetime pretending to forget” (5), Grace finds that Ursula’s inquiry into her past prompts an uncontrollable “deluge” of recollections (6). Grace’s decision to tell her own story, and to pass this to the Hartford’s last—if unacknowledged— male descendant, her grandson Marcus, signifies her growing agency in reclaiming both her hidden past and her true identity. Her story “belongs” to him through her bloodline, and the man and the narrative are two interlinked parts of her surviving legacy. As Grace thinks in Chapter 3 when remembering the young Hartfords, “those who live in memories are never really dead” (25): After death she joins those characters who are kept alive by remembrance.