Aussie author Kate Morton again impresses me with her new novel, "The Distant Hours," another literary portrait of a doomed early Twentieth Century English aristocratic family. The narrator is the grown daughter of the young girl this family had sheltered from the London Blitz during World War Two. The belated delivery of a long lost letter which had been sent to her mother 50 years earlier starts in motion a chain of events during which the daughter will tie together all of the loose ends of a chapter in her mother's life which she had never even mentioned.

Kate Morton's three novels have all been on New York Times best selling lists, quite a feat for an author who has yet to turn 40 years of age. More stunning still is the fact that while she has grown up "down under" in the mountains of southeast Queensland, Australia, all of her novels are sited in England and have as their focus early Twentieth Century family life in the great houses of the English aristocracy. Her richly textured stories with strong Gothic romantic leanings portray and analyze the declining condition of the English upper class throughout the Twentieth Century as observed through the eyes of an outsider. 

Now pursuing her doctorate at the University of Queensland after having obtained degrees in Dramatic Art and English Literature, Kate Morton lives in the City of Brisbane with her husband and two young sons. Her beautiful writing is a work of art, and I deeply admire the facility with which she segues back and forth in time in stories which move effortlessly from the often difficult times at present back to happier times when aristocratic privileges still had their place along with an economic raison d'être.  

Her three novels, "The House at Riverton," "The Forgotten Garden," and now this latest novel, "The Distant Hours," all share the common theme of the decline of the English aristocracy for one or more of several possible reasons. In her stories the aristocratic families and the homes in which they live are both in a state of great decay and on the point of imminent collapse, as if one were a metaphor for the other. 

Morton spends considerable time chronicling the causes for this decline, the main reason being that many of these families lost both their brothers and their sons along with the members of their household staffs to World War One. In addition, many of the women left behind left household employ to work in the industrial factories supporting the war effort. After "The Great War" ended, the returning soldiers along with many of these women were no longer willing to settle for a lowly job "in service." 

And that's even if the owners of the great estates could afford to hire them. The decline of the English aristocracy was hastened by the onset of income and inheritance taxes, and the many families which experienced financial difficulty had to sell off parts of their inheritance. The result was that working estates were broken up and sold to pay current expenses instead of providing for future income.

Besides the rise of the middle class and increased taxation, Morton also suggests another possible reason for the decline of the aristocracy, which is the onset of familial insanity. This theme forms the subtext of her three stories to date, and the problems associated with inherited insanity are especially prevalent in "The Distant Hours." Morton doesn't address the possible causes for insanity running in families, but inbreeding resulting from marriages between cousins to keep estates intact could have been the source for this scourge.

While reading the three novels to date by this author has been a great pleasure, I do hope that Morton broadens the selection of her topics to cover themes and time frames other than what she has mined so well so far. In my humble opinion, she has been there and done that, and any more said on these topics will be done to excess. Morton has the writing talent to head in new directions, and I certainly hope that she does so. 

From "The House at Riverton," which I believe to be an exquisitely well written and well constructed story, on to this, her third novel, I found something of a decline in the content and the construction of her stories, which have become progressively overwrought and overripe as they have veered into what are essentially Gothic romantic tragedies. This novel symbolizes that definition with its tale of madness, lost loves, broken dreams, a decaying Milderhurst Castle with a tower bedroom, and a scary children's story forming the foundations for the plot. The only things left missing are dashing, devil-may-care men, heaving bosoms, and ripping bodices.

A long lost letter discovered and finally delivered to its recipient after the passage of 50 years is the initial plot device which may seem trite and taken from a black and white Forties movie, but it worked beautifully for me. Meredith Burchill in London receives a special letter from the Post Office, a letter which had been lost in an attic for the last 50 years. 

There was stunning news in that letter, but Mrs. Burchill would never make it public, not to the news people who had inquired about the story, nor to her own daughter, Edie Burchill. Edie knew that there was a story, because her mother had broken down in tears and had retired to her bedroom. Later she would compose herself and only say that the letter had come from the daughter of a family which had hosted her when she was evacuated from London at the start of World War Two. 

Edie Burchill, the vice chairman of a small Notting Hill publishing company, discovers a deep emotional connection to Milderhurst Castle when she learns that this was the home of the author Raymond Blythe. He had penned the famous Gothic children's fable, "The True History of the Mud Man," which had been her favorite childhood story. 

A business trip to Kent allows her time to make a side trip to Milderhurst and tour the once grand Milderhurst Castle, the home of the elderly Blythe sisters. There she will meet octogenarians Percy and Saphy Blythe  along with their sadly demented younger sister, Juniper. Juniper will shock Edie by addressing her using the name of her mother before Edie has disclosed to them that it was her mother who had been billeted with them during World War Two. 2010, Simon & Schuster/Atria, 480 pages.