Synopsis
Haunted by phantoms of World War II and the Holocaust, young Cressida lives in terror of George Harding, who, severely disfigured, has returned from the front to recover on his family’s African estate. When Harding plucks young Cressida’s beautiful mother and family from financial ruin, establishing them in the old servants’ quarters, Cressida is swept into a life inexorably bound to his.
In her new setting, she is conscripted to enliven Harding’s nephew, the hopelessly timid Edgar, to make him “wild and daring.” She takes on this task with resentful fury, leading the boy astray and, in the process, learning to manipulate the disparities of power, class, and ambition. All the while, Harding himself is watching her. And waiting.
The Servants’ Quarters, a complex and sophisticated love story, evokes a vanishing world of privilege with a Pygmalion twist. It is, as Amy Tan said, “Freed’s best novel yet.”
The New York Times - William Boyd
Freed writes with great clarity and skill, and her occupancy of Cressida's voice is exemplary. Short novel though this is, it contains multitudes—among the themes explored are wartime guilt, the Holocaust, the position of South African Jews in a fundamentally British class system and the extent to which our social relations are determined by our self-appointed roles as servants or masters.