Novel: Father Melancholy's Daughter

Publication note
Gail Godwin’s Father Melancholy’s Daughter was first published in 1991; later reprints appeared in the 2000s. The summary below concerns the novel itself rather than a specific edition.

Overview
Told in a poised first-person voice, the novel follows Margaret, the daughter of an Episcopal priest in a small Virginia town, from childhood into early adulthood. Her father’s parishioners call him, half-affectionately and half-warily, Father Melancholy, a nickname that captures both his intellectual gravitas and his unshakable sadness. When Margaret’s mother abruptly leaves, the daughter becomes her father’s closest companion and caretaker, growing up in the shadow of his faith, his moods, and the rituals of the Anglican tradition. The story becomes a spiritual and psychological coming-of-age tale, charting how a bright, observant girl learns to claim a self that is not merely an echo of a beloved, wounded parent.

Story
The novel opens with absence: Margaret’s mother departs without warning, leaving a six-year-old to interpret the silence and a priest to explain it to his flock. Margaret’s life thereafter is shaped by the house of a widower-in-all-but-name, with the rhythms of church seasons, parish dramas, and her father’s oscillations between austerity and tenderness. She is precociously competent and painfully loyal, managing school and choir practices while absorbing the unspoken assignment of keeping Father Melancholy steady.

As Margaret grows, the mystery of her mother’s leaving acquires multiple competing narratives. Letters arrive, stories are told and retold, and a famous novelist takes an avid interest in the family’s past, threatening to fix their private pain into a public myth. Margaret’s efforts to sift truth from interpretation mirror her father’s sermons, which search literature and theology for meanings that can hold. College and first loves widen her world, giving her mentors and models beyond the parish. Yet even in independence, she remains tethered by questions: What did her mother seek? What does fidelity demand of a daughter? How does vocation form when one’s earliest calling was to prop up another?

A crisis in the parish exposes the limits of stoicism and the cost of living inside inherited stories. Margaret confronts her father’s illness and the wounds that his holiness can neither cancel nor fully bless. By the end, she has assembled a more complicated account of her origins, one that honors her father’s goodness without idealizing it, acknowledges her mother’s damage without reducing her to villain or muse, and recognizes the power and peril of storytellers who would claim other people’s lives as material. The novel closes with Margaret poised at the threshold of her own future, her voice tempered by sorrow and steadied by a dawning sense of purpose.

Themes and motifs
Godwin weaves a meditation on melancholy as both affliction and gift, showing how it can refine compassion while narrowing vision. The book probes the porous boundary between faith and psychology, asking how liturgy, music, and Anglican aesthetics can console without anesthetizing. It is also about ownership of narrative: who controls the tale of a family’s rupture, and how competing versions, devotional, artistic, gossipy, therapeutic, shape identity. The father-daughter bond is tender and ethically fraught, illuminating the ways love can become a vocation that delays or even distorts the discovery of one’s own.

Style and tone
Margaret’s retrospective voice is literate, restrained, and quietly piercing, alive to the textures of parish life and the seductions of beautiful explanations. The novel’s moral power comes from its refusal of melodrama; instead, it offers clear-eyed compassion for flawed parents and the children who must live with their legacies.