The Three Black Pennys: A Novel — Story, Setting & Ideas

Generations and Their Repeating Patterns

The novel is structured in three parts—"The Furnace," "The Forge," and "The Metal"—each focusing on a different Penny generation. The excerpts show how certain traits recur: the "sombre eyes" and "firm eyebrows drawn up at the temples" that mark Howat Penny are echoed in his descendant Jasper, who has "sombre eyes, under their brows drawn up toward the temples." This physical inheritance is matched by a psychological one: both men exhibit a kind of emotional detachment and a tendency to view relationships as matters of will. Jasper, for instance, is "accustomed to the bending of circumstance to his will" and believes he can "prove stronger than any hesitancy" in a woman. The novel seems to examine whether such patterns are inescapable or can be broken.

The Weight of the Past on Present Desire

Jasper Penny is "conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight dragging at his attempted progress." This image captures a central tension: the past is not merely remembered but felt as a physical impediment. The "secret errors of all the pasts that had made him" rise "in a haggard, shadowy troop about his bed." Yet Jasper also tries to rationalize his desires, telling himself that "if nothing perished but the mere, shredding flesh, one quality persisted equally with the other." This philosophical self-justification—equating a living woman with a dead one—reveals a mind that uses abstraction to override moral scruple. The excerpts suggest that the novel traces how personal history and family legacy shape, and sometimes distort, the characters' most intimate choices.

Setting as a Mirror of Character

The landscapes in the excerpts are never mere backdrops. The opening twilight is "like blue dust sifted" into the hills, a simile that evokes both delicacy and industrial residue. Later, Jasper drives away "in a sparkling veil of flung snow crystals," the beauty of the scene contrasting with his cold calculations about ending an affair. The domestic interiors also carry weight: the "white-panelled hearth of the yellow room" and "candles wavering in tepid April airs" from the dedication suggest a world of refined sensibility. Yet this refinement coexists with the brutal realities of iron-making and the characters' emotional manipulations. The novel uses setting to externalize inner states, making the physical world a participant in the drama of inheritance and change.

Readers should attend to the novel's three-part structure and the way Hergesheimer uses recurring motifs—the furnace, the forge, the metal—to suggest both continuity and transformation. The prose rewards close attention to its sensory details and its ironic undercurrents. The excerpts offer only glimpses of the full narrative arc, but they indicate a work concerned with how the past lives on in the present, not as memory alone but as a force that shapes action and desire.

Years among the shelves taught me how some books whisper to one another across centuries. Hergesheimer’s Pennys wrestle with the weight of inheritance, the clank of iron binding them to fate. I find that same somber echo in the Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) — Themes and Context, where duty and regret sit quietly side by side. A shared melancholy, perhaps. Old friends, these.