Share of Sorrow - Tessa Hardly

Tessa Hadley is a British author of novels, short stories and non-fiction. Her writing is realistic and often focuses on family relationships.^[1]

I had to make an analysis of Tessa Hadley’s short story, “Her Share of Sorrow”. You can see in this short story that Tessa Hadley’s focus is in family relationships. The short story deals with a broken relationship between a girl, her brother and her parents.

The short story, “Her Share of Sorrow”, tells a story of Ruby, her brother, Nico and her parents, Dalia and Adrian.

Ruby’s mother, Dalia, is a former dancer and currently a psychotherapist. Her father, Adrian, is a administrator for an innovative theatre company. Her brother, Nico, is distinguished, beautiful, tall and thin like his parents. Ruby is 10 years old and is the youngest family member. Ruby is quite different from the rest of her family. Ruby is chubby, short and has freckled skin.

In the summer holiday Ruby and her family went to France for three weeks. Dalia needed desperately to unwind and leave her clients behind. Adrian and Nico hired some bikes and went out. Ruby spends her days in the attic of the holiday house, because she cannot live without WI-FI and she hates the sun.

During the holiday Ruby’s parents discover that their daughter finally managed to occupy her time with something other than WI-FI. Ruby spends all her time of the holiday in the attic, where she constantly reads novels and it is funny, because Ruby had never liked books before.

Ruby gets filled with the possibilities, when her and her family is home again. There is two weeks of holiday left, before Ruby has to return to school. Ruby decides to write a novel. When her parents find out about her novel, they get delighted and very interested in Ruby’s novel. Ruby is a very insecure girl and she was already in the moment regretting telling them about her novel. Ruby is very private about her novel, but one day, when Ruby is not careful enough her brother steals her notebook from her and begins to read out loud passages from her novel to their parents while laughing.

Ruby did not understand why they all were laughing at her novel, so she went to her room and stayed there barricaded and inconsolable. The same evening her parents and her brother said apologies. After receiving apologies from her family Ruby was able to write in the novel again.  

The Share of the Sorrow contains the four elements: exposition, rising action, climax, and falling action.

The exposition contains around Ruby’s mother Dalia. The short story starts with: “Ruby’s mother, Dalia, used to be a dancer before she had her children. Then she’d trained to be a psychotherapist, and you got the feeling she’d disowned her dancing days, looking back on them as delusion and vanity. Yet still she carried herself in that dancer’s exquisitely conscious way, as if she was held taut by a thread running up from the crown of her head.”^[2] The author finds it more important to give the reader information about Ruby’s mother instead of Ruby. It becomes clear, that Dalia will become an important role in the story. In this quote you can also see, that Ruby is not even close to be like her mother and that is wrong in some opinions. “Ruby’s name might have suited her if she’d been smouldering and mysterious like her mother in the dance photographs. But she was plump and stubby with short, fat arms, lank, beige-coloured hair and fair, freckled skin that turned pink easily in the sun or if she told lies – which she quite often did. She looked like a changeling in that family, other people thought.”^[3]
The exposition reveals that Ruby is not interested in the same as her mother. Ruby cannot live up to her mother’s expectations.