Are their opposing tastes the product of their temperaments or the episodes in their young lives? What is your understanding of her revulsion to sex?ġ1. Chapter four recounts the moment when Edward tells Florence he loves her because she’s “square,” not in spite of it. To what extent was the financial gulf between Edward and Florence a source of trouble? How might the relationship have unfolded, particularly during this time period, if Edward, not Florence, had been the spouse with financial security?ġ0. How did their parents affect their attitudes toward life? How did the limitations of Edward’s mother shape his feelings about responsibility and women? Was Florence drawn to her mother’s competitiveness?ĩ. Compare Edward’s upbringing to Florence’s. What did Edward’s decision to go to London for college indicate about his goals? What was Florence’s dream for her future? Was marriage a greater social necessity for her, as a woman? Would her career as a classical musician necessarily have been sacrificed if she had remained with Edward?Ĩ. How would you characterize the kind of love they developed? What made them believe they were perfect for one another? Are any two people perfect for one another?ħ. Chapter two describes how Florence and Edward met the first paragraph tells us that they were too sophisticated to believe in destiny. Were Florence and Edward incompatible in ways beyond sexual ones? What do their difficulties in bed say about their relationship altogether? Or is sex an isolated aspect of a marriage?Ħ. At what point did Edward and Florence’s solemnity become viewed as old–fashioned? What contributed to that shift? What are your recollections, or those shared by relatives who lived it, of the emerging youth culture of the late 1960s and ’70s?ĥ. We are also told that Edward was born in 1940, while his parents contemplated possible outcomes of the war with Germany. Ian McEwan describes the novel’s time period as an era when youth was not glorified but adulthood was.
What might have been the intention in including that line when this version of the marriage ceremony was written? How does it make Edward feel?Ĥ. Edward replays the words “with my body I thee worship” in his mind. Is Edward’s libido truly the primary reason he proposes marriage, or were other factors involved (perhaps ones he did not even admit to himself)? Are relationships harmed or helped by cultural restrictions against sex before marriage? Would this marriage have taken place if the couple had met when birth–control pills were no longer just a rumor?ģ.
What do the novel’s opening lines tell us about Edward and Florence? How did your perceptions of them change throughout the subsequent pages? What details did you eventually know about them that they never fully revealed to one another?Ģ.
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