Tag: Feminism

Posted in Ten on Tuesday

Ten on Tuesday: Naughty Girls and Transgressive Women

Posted on by thelotusreaders

If you ask me why I’m always drawn to naughty girls and women who push the boundaries I’d have to look back to these four characters: Pippi Longstocking, Jo March, Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables. They might not seem particularly naughty at first glance but there’s definitely a streak of mischief, a need to push against what’s expected of young women, a blazing temper that’s hard to keep in check and with three of them, a yearning to do something more than the expected route of marriage and children. There’s an independence in each of them, three are orphans in fact, while the fourth is determined to play her father’s role while he’s away fighting in the civil war. Jo flouts the rules of dress, standing out amongst her sisters who are happy to adopt the corsets and heavy skirts of 19th Century American fashion. Jo feels like she can’t move in them, preferring to wear a plainer and more masculine form of dressing and avoiding all social occasions that involve dressing up. She also sells her long hair so that there’s money for Marmee to go to Washington to see their wounded father. Anne is a feminine girl but wants to outshine the boys at school with her mind, driven to be the best and go to university rather than staying home and marrying. She knows she needs something of her own to work towards whether it’s teaching or writing. Pippi is a dream of a character with her pigtails and an ahead of the curve tendency towards dopamine dressing. She lives with a horse and a monkey, something I’ve contemplated as a better option after my worst relationships! I think she is the genesis of my childhood dream to have a mansion with a separate room or outbuilding for each type of animal – dogs, cats, rabbits and of course hares, my spirit animal. Having a brother meant I was always climbing trees, making dens, reading while he fished and running through fields and woods with dogs. We had an immense amount of freedom, only going home at tea time or when I’d injured myself. Some of that care free nature left when I had a spinal injury and started secondary school in the same year.

Then there’s Jane Eyre, a moral character who shows incredible self-awareness around living within her own beliefs. She knew she couldn’t live with Rochester while he had a wife, not because of what others thought, but because of the type of woman she wanted to be. Similarly she refuses St. John Rivers’s proposal because she knows she can’t marry without love. When younger though, this sense of what was right got her into trouble as she stood up to her bullying cousin John, her Aunt Read and headmaster Mr Brocklehurst. She even tries to fight back against the servants when her Aunt asks them to lock her in the Red Room for a punishment. They want her to be less passionate and reactive, but although Jane learns to curb her temper there’s a lot going on under that quiet surface. The thing I shared most with Jo March and Anne of Green Gables was that I wanted to write. Jo scribbles in the garret, trying to sell her romances to the newspaper and writing plays for her sisters to perform. Anne is also influenced by romance, writing about handsome heroes and houses with gilded halls. Both are given advice about their writing that they don’t appreciate, in fact both have terrible tempers. Gilbert’s teasing of Anne infuriated her so much she smashed her slate over his head and made it quite clear his advice wasn’t appreciated when she first starts writing in adulthood. Jo and sister Amy had blazing rows and it was Amy’s ability to curb her irritability that won her a trip to Europe with Aunt March instead of Jo who couldn’t resist snapping back at the grumpy old woman. Instead she visits New York and meets Professor Bhaer who tells her to write about something she knows, leading to her book based around her sisters. Characters who move outside their social boundaries and expectations are so much more interesting and I think that’s why I’m drawn to books with women who are unexpected and live colourful lives. Here are some of the books I’ve loved that showcase women like this.

This brilliant historical novel, set in the 1920s, is inspired by the notorious all-female crime syndicate known as the Forty Elephants who operated out of the slums of south London.

Ruby Mills is ruthlessly ambitious, strikingly beautiful – and one of the Forty Thieves’ most talented members. The Forty Thieves were a real life band of pickpockets and thieves and Ruby has worked herself up to become one of the best, even working alongside male tricksters when their heists need a woman. Harriet Littlemore writes the women’s section in a local newspaper. She’s from a ‘good’ London family and engaged to an up-and-coming Member of Parliament – but she wants a successful career of her own. After witnessing Ruby fleeing the scene of a robbery, Harriet develops a fascination with the elusive young thief that extends beyond journalistic interest. As their personal aspirations bring them into closer contact than society’s rules usually allow, Ruby and Harriet’s stories become increasingly intertwined. Their magnetic dynamic, fraught with envy and desire, tells a compulsive, cinematic story about class, morality and the cost of being an independent woman in 1920s London. This book was absolutely fascinating and actually outshone another well known writer’s book set around the same time and in the same circles. It’s hard not to root for Ruby, even when she’s stealing.

Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl – I knew it at once! – that I had ever seen.’

This saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance follows the glittering career of Nan King – oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End ‘tom’. Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty’s dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins. I love Sarah Waters’s characters because they show us a different side of the Victorians from the accepted narrative. They show us that Victorian society was just as multi-layered as ours and their infamous sexual prudery was only skin deep. This book and the BBC adaptation caused quite a stir at the time, mainly for the sexual content, but what’s truly groundbreaking was the authors desire to place these women into a history that didn’t include them.

Margaret Mitchell’s page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope and loss set against the tense historical background of the American Civil War.  The lovers at the novel’s centre – the selfish, privileged Scarlett O’Hara and rakish Rhett Butler – are magnetic: pulling readers into the tangled narrative of a struggle to survive that cannot be forgotten. This is a great example of a character who is stubborn, defiant, arrogant and a rule breaker, who turns out to be exactly what her family needs at a time of upheaval. Scarlett is a spoiled girl and doesn’t turn into the sweet, passive Southern Belle her mother and sisters would have wished for. She’s filled with a rebellious spirit that with experience becomes a core of steel. This is a woman who doesn’t even hesitate to get what she wants, whether that’s a new dress, the attentions of someone else’s suitor or the business deal that will make her rich. She speaks her mind, curses and does business like a man. She never apologises either, happy to tread on toes if it gets her closer to her goal. I love the scene where she flouts the mourning rules at the charity ball and Rhett Butler makes a donation to dance with her. She’s been behind a stall, in her widow’s dress with legs twitching under her somber skirts. She can’t wait to dance and practically vaults over a table to do so. Yet it’s her ability to think and act like a man that saves her life and gives her the constant assurance that even though she’s lost everything, tomorrow is another day.

When Korede’s dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what’s expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This’ll be the third boyfriend Ayoola’s dispatched in ‘self-defence’ and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede’s long been in love with him, and isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other…

These two sisters are absolutely fascinating and challenge our perceptions of what women are capable of, as well as expectations around beauty. A female serial killer is rare in fiction and in life, but this challenges that expectation. Why can’t women be serial killers? Do they possess more empathy and restraint than men? There’s also a perception around beauty, something that goes beyond the bias that comes from desire. People who know the sisters make an assumption that Korede must be jealous of her sister and wish she had her beauty and charm. A difficult childhood and poor relationship with their father has brought them closer together and is the seed of their collusion now. It has given them the resilience and survival instinct that takes them across boundaries of what is morally and legally right. Their complex relationship and the dark humour of the novel made it a memorable story.

Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish.

Rather the opposite in fact – simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge. A blackly comic satire of the war of the sexes, The Life and Loves of a She Devil is the fantasy of the wronged woman made real.

I utterly loved this book as a teenager and must have read it at least once a year since ( I have a very battered copy). Once transformed, Ruth has no boundaries and no mercy, her sole purpose in life is to gain revenge on her husband and his mistress Mary Fisher. She’s furious that they are having an illicit honeymoon in Mary’s coastal tower while she is big, clumsy and now saddled with two children and various unruly pets. Slowly she takes steps to right the wrongs she’s experienced, taking unexpected lovers, gaining money and even transforming herself on the outside through plastic surgery. She leaves her children at the tower for their father, plus an unruly dog. She even gets a job at the residential home where Mary’s mother is living. Using other people’s bedpans she fakes nightly incontinence so she loses her place and must be placed in a nursing facility or with Mary Fisher. There is something twisted but delicious about her revenge, especially that final description of the life she builds for herself on her own terms.

When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent, of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba’s life falls apart, Barbara is there…

I think this might be a more controversial book now than it was when published. Here we have two deeply flawed female characters, one who is reckless and commits a crime, another who is obsessively jealous and frighteningly manipulative. Sheba starts working at a secondary school in London and meets Barbara, an older and strait-laced history teacher. When Sheba starts an affair with a pupil who is 15 years old, Barbara benefits from the fall out. Slowly becoming Sheba’s confidante and as gaining more and more control as the affair tears Sheba’s life apart. I didn’t like either of the women, but as a study of obsession this is hard to beat. Barbara is like a spider, awaiting her prey and spinning a web from the loneliness and longing she feels. This is a deeply unsettling page turner, I’ve read it several times now and it doesn’t lose its power. I’ve found it’s a more difficult watch than it is a read. Both Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench are excellent in the film adaptation but it’s the presence of the boy that disturbs. While reading we can convince ourselves that he is all the things Sheba tells us he is, the confident and experienced seducer. But when we see a boy who looks 15 playing the role it feels different, we can see that Sheba’s assessment of him could be her kidding herself and us that she’s not a predator.

‘I am not, at heart, a jumper. I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I’d attend my sister’s wedding’

Cassandra Edwards is driving home to her family’s Californian ranch to attend the wedding of her beloved identical twin, Judith. A graduate student at Berkeley, Cassandra is gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable – and hell-bent on making sure her sister’s wedding doesn’t happen. Around six months ago, Judith left the apartment they shared for Juilliard and ever since Cassandra has been having a long drawn out nervous breakdown. She’s been seeing a therapist called Dr. Mercer and had a clutch bag full of pills from her prescriptions of uppers and downers. She also seems to have an unquenchable thirst for brandy, but still arrives determined to make Judith see sense. With the twins alone for the first couple of days the truth of their co-dependency becomes clearer and Cassandra unravels. As her sister leaves to pick up her fiance at the airport Cassandra feels betrayed and isolated by her twin. Now she is alone with her thoughts and her pills. Maybe she can stop the wedding another way. This classic of twentieth-century American literature is a tragicomedy, offering witty conversation and a deep psychological study of two women finding it difficult to separate and make their own lives. Cassandra is hell bent on creating mischief but it’s more from her own loneliness and pain. This is stylish, witty and insightful and depicts a girl coming to terms with who she is and the only life she has.

Paul Sheldon used to write for a living. Now he’s writing to stay alive.

Misery Chastain is dead. Paul Sheldon has just killed her – with relief, with joy. Misery made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of bestsellers. And now he wants to get on to some real writing. 

That’s when the car accident happens, and he wakes up splinted and in pain, in the remote mountain home of his rescuer, Annie Wilkes. The good news is that Annie was a nurse and has pain-killing drugs. The bad news is that she has long been Paul’s Number One Fan. And when she finds out what Paul has done to Misery, she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it at all . . 

Annie Wilkes is one of the most feared villains in horror fiction, not only is she obsessive and dangerous – something we don’t expect in women – she’s a nurse, the epitome of the ‘caring’ female and often depicted as angelic. Annie is determined to do what’s in Paul’s best interests because only then can he write another Misery Chastain novel and undo the literary death he’s just given her. If Paul thought he’d had enough of Misery Chastain, he hadn’t met Annie Wilkes yet. Stephen King writes her so cleverly with little touches that make her seem repulsive: the smell of food constantly on her breath and her clothing, unexplained stains on her clothing and unwashed hair. She speaks to him in a kind of baby talk, using mispronounced or unlikely phrases that just sound odd. If Paul doesn’t turn out a new page or two each day she might fly into a rage and Paul has seen what Annie might do in a rage. Once when looking out the window after hearing voices he witnesses Annie run over a police officer with a lawnmower. Annie is horrifying, psychopathic and her mood swings are sudden. Yet every time we hear her shambling towards Paul’s bedroom door we’re glued to what she might do next!

I couldn’t list transgressive heroines without finishing on the iconic Lizbeth Salander, who started out in Stieg Larsson’s book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. This tattooed and pierced, leather clad, super intelligent young woman is an icon. Everything about her exterior is spiky but that’s a defense mechanism, if you look underneath there’s a pale, waif- like girl who’s had a lifetime of abandonment and abuse. Her struggle to fit into a society that puts us in boxes is actually a strength. She’s learned to cope alone, knowing that even where we’re supposed to belong – our family – doesn’t mean we’re safe. Even the very system that’s supposed to care and provide safety to children is corrupted. She trusts no one. She doesn’t even expect justice to come through for her and metes out her own punishment, with the same brutality she’s faced. She has learned when to fight and when to stay in the shadows. The only people she trusts are an online group of fellow hackers, who she never meets in person. Her relationship with journalist Blomkvist is not her usual pattern, but he doesn’t judge and slowly they develop enough trust to work together. She has reached a point through online security work and hacking criminals to be totally independent, leaving her dependent on no one. I find Lisbeth absolutely fascinating and will happily reread the first three books in this series again and again.

When I first found this book, before the television series, I was astounded that a woman had the bravery to live on her own terms as early as the Georgians. Anne Lister’s journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was a Regency landowner in Yorkshire, an intrepid world traveller … and an unabashed lover of other women. In this brilliant biography, author Angela Steidele uses Anne Lister’s diaries to create a portrait of a woman we had never seen before in fiction, never mind biography. The picture we usually have of Regency women is Jane Austen-esque, but this woman is both very much of her time in some ways and in others far ahead of it. Anne Lister recorded absolutely everything from the most intimate details of her numerous trysts, her plans to make her fortune by exploiting the coal seams under her family estate in Halifax and her reaction to the events of her time. Her love life had a labyrinthine complexity, but she was searching for a girlfriend to settle with. She wanted a woman could provide her with both financial security and true love, who also had the bravery to live in the unconventional and unapologetic way that Anne had chosen for herself.

Posted in Personal Purchase

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’d seen so many extremely varied viewpoints on this book that I couldn’t resist dipping in and it was definitely worth the hype it’s received. I read it voraciously over two days, so excited and so confused towards the end I realised I’d read it too fast. I had to go back and force myself to read it slowly. Read either way, this really is a delicious story that has hit at exactly the right time in history. With the US administration rolling back women’s rights and rumours about the implementation of Project 25 it feels like we’re watching Gilead formed in real life. One of the most controversial online figures in this huge political move to the far right is that of the ‘trad wife’, a woman who lives her life focused solely on the home, children and obeying her husband who is always head of the household. This might come from a religious conviction or a political one, but social media is awash with trad wife influencers like Hannah Neelham who shows life at the family farm and cooking from scratch or Estee Williams who proudly declares a return to 1950s values where motherhood and domesticity are the priority. To me this feels like the logical extension of the late 1990s dating book ‘The Rules’, much lauded by Charlotte in Sex and the City. Single women were advised to keep their distance and mystery on the dating scene – with men naturally being pursuers they are more responsive to women who play hard to get. It also advocated withholding sexual contact and focusing on the man’s wants and needs. It stands to reason that any eventual marriage would also involve the man’s needs coming first and feminists are concerned that the current trad wife trend appears like a pop culture phenomenon, but is born of patriarchal policies that will set back women’s autonomy and authority by decades. Of course the obvious paradox here is the influencer’s monetisation of the trad wife lifestyle, promoting the concept of the man as sole breadwinner while simultaneously operating successful and lucrative online content creation businesses, often with merchandising and multiple staff. These women are highly driven and ambitious and this is where our main character Natalie is situated; right at the centre of the monetisation paradox. 

The story is told through Natalie in a compelling inner monologue that had me absolutely gripped, despite disliking her quite intensely. The author takes us back to her college days, where she keeps herself separate from her roommate and other students often with a condescending and superior attitude. She firmly believes she has the answer to why feminism isn’t working, labelling her roommate the archetypal ‘angry woman’ who thinks they can have it all but will only end up exhausted and dissatisfied. She marries Caleb and is pregnant before graduation, not finishing her degree. She’s married into a political dynasty, with Cal’s father hoping to start a presidential campaign soon. Obviously they are republicans and Natalie’s father in law does point out that Caleb could be perfect for politics, being an ‘idiot’ who has no direction and is easily controlled. It’s Natalie who gets the idea to run a ranch, scouting for suitable properties and approaching her father-in-law for funding. He agrees to give them the five million they need, but Nat must keep her end of the bargain and keep producing beautiful grandbabies. She sets out to sell the great American Dream on social media, giving her ranch the tongue in cheek name ‘Yesteryear’. Despite having no farming experience, the plans for are to keep livestock, grow vegetables and become self-sufficient. She sets out to represent their lifestyle as pioneers, deliberately choosing her decor accordingly and instructing builders to hide all their modern appliances behind doors and false walls. She starts out posting nostalgic pictures, but then expands to videos where she and the children cook from scratch or make items for the house. Before long she has a business on her hands and now she isn’t just hiding the appliances, but two nannies and a producer, not to mention the merchandising. What could possibly go wrong?

This is a book with some huge reveals, you won’t always know what’s going on and you won’t be able to put it down – I was even reading while cooking the tea. I was so involved that when Natalie wakes up one morning to find her home isn’t as she knows it I was completely discombobulated – we ended up with gluey spaghetti that night! There’s no electricity and she finds children in her kitchen eating breakfast by candlelight, but they’re not her children. Caleb looks like her husband but there’s nothing behind his eyes. She’s now living pioneer life for real and when she opens the cupboards to look for her appliances, there aren’t any. There’s no help either. Her eldest daughter Mary cares for her with something close to a resigned exasperation, making sure that even if Natalie is only sitting, she can still do laundry and churn butter. Imagine a more realistic version of Little House on the Prairie where you can never escape to a power shower or flushing toilet. Natalie asks herself what’s going on: is this a punishment for something she’s done, has she lost her mind or is this some sort of sick reality TV situation? Is God punishing her. She’s now a trad wife for real, but she definitely isn’t happy, nor is she making any money.

This book is so well written, incredibly ambitious and captures the zeitgeist. I didn’t like Natalie but found her inner voice almost hypnotic. She’s deliberately hiding her intelligence and business brain on screen, but makes the comment that her eldest daughter takes after her because she holds “her intelligence like a knife behind her back.”However, once she becomes a traditional wife for real Caleb is the head of the household and she realises that whatever their home situation men can opt out of chores and childcare with no explanation, whereas she’s being forced out of bed while unwell. I was intrigued about where her belief system comes from, expecting generational religious beliefs and trauma but her mother and sister, while religious, have compassion and the ability to accept changes to their world view. They have understanding and compassion, something that Natalie seems to lack and it is utterly damning when her mother asks her why it’s so hard for her to be kind. I was so angry about the hypocrisy, pushing her ‘lifestyle’ to an online audience of women while keeping, not only her modern applicances, but the help hidden. She must know she’s making women feel inadequate, taking their money and lying to them. Once you become a tool of the patriarchy you’re an enemy of your fellow women, even though she gives them lip service by repeating the Christian Nationalist narrative that a trad wife is equal to her husband in the eyes of God – her work is different but of equal value. How can they be equal when only one of them has autonomy and the final say? In fact she openly fears aspects of the real pioneer life, especially giving birth. She is also aware of the paradox: 

‘To be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them.’ 

It’s only by pretending they have nothing, that she becomes rich. I think I kept reading because I was so desperate to see her carefully planned, fake world fall apart. At a time where feminists are debating whether they’d rather be alone with a man or a bear (and regularly choosing the bear) she pedals a dangerous rhetoric and any woman selling it is colluding with the patriarchy. On a day where I’ve seen yet another group of white British men on trial for raping a woman drugged by her husband, I’m not inclined to give any man that sort of power over me. This week a pregnant woman on holiday in Florida had an incomplete miscarriage and was still, days later, unable to get the procedure she needed to prevent infection. This is because she wasn’t in her home state and doctors in Florida were unsure on the legal position of performing a D and C operation thanks to ‘pro-life’ policies. Another woman who’d been informed that her baby was too malformed to survive outside the womb, was bombarded with hate on Instagram for choosing to end her pregnancy early. Female influencers can’t post on social media without facing a barrage of abuse from trolls. Thanks to all this, men like Andrew Tate and Christian Nationalist men in positions of huge power, I have a permanent level of inner rage. There should be a special level of hell for women who take up this cause and use their religious beliefs to make life harder for their fellow women. I let go a bit of that rage while reading this because it helped me remember that what we see online is like any other representation of real life – heavily edited and stretching the truth, if not an outright lie. Not only is this book addictive and inventive, but through Natalie, the author blows apart the whole hypocritical and dangerous industry as well as the Christian Nationalist ideology that espouses trad wives and I absolutely loved that. 

Out Now from Fourth Estate.

Meet The Author

Caro Claire Burke received her Master’s in Fine Arts from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the co-host of Diabolical Lies, a politics and culture podcast. YESTERYEAR is her first novel.

Posted in Writing and Writers

Who Inspires You? My Writing Heroes.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

My blog is a little different today because it is inspired by Monday’s WordPress prompt – who inspires you? Like many bloggers and readers I am an aspiring writer. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to be able to walk into a library and see my book on the shelf. I used to make little books, sewn into colourful covers, my writing is definitely better than my drawing. One particular book about a family of chickens is in a box in the attic, but remains infamous in my family because when my mum read it she was anxious the school would think this was my home life. Mr and Mrs Cockadoodledo were very volatile and he was fond of telling his wife she was a nag and stomping off to the pub while she watched Coronation Street. So far, the closest I’ve come to writing a book as an adult was writing the story of me and my late husband, killed by complications with primary progressive MS. I managed to finish it and then format it (goodness knows how) to go on Kindle around 15 years ago. I think it probably sold half a dozen copies. Everyone was very kind about it, but let’s be honest it’s hard to be critical to a recent widow. When it came to reformatting it I was finishing my counselling training so I let it go. So that’s where I am. I do have a work in progress, but it’s all fragments at the moment. I struggle with flow, a very negative inner voice and my health limitations. So today I thought I’d share people whose writing I really admired recently and how they’ve inspired me to keep writing. 

Rachel Canwell – Canwell’s debut novel Paper Sisters was brilliant and made me realise that any setting is fascinating if the writer makes it so. Set in my home county of Lincolnshire, in an area that suffers many jokes about Fen Folk and endless fields filled with mist and cabbage, Rachel still managed to draw me in. In fact she took the isolation of the area and made her characters grow from that, with their house, sited across the river from Sutton Bridge and accessed via a swing bridge. The abandoned hospital next door is primed, ready for patients that will never come creating an eerie and abandoned feeling. She uses the peculiar Lincolnshire mist to great effect in her opening scene as the family are woken by a rumbling noise coming from the small port area being built across the river. As they emerge into the darkness, the mist rises above the river and obscures their view but they can hear crashes and objects falling into the water. The mist also obscures the rescue of workers, leading to the terrible drowning of one of the brothers. I recognised that mist from years of living next to the River Trent, and eerie nights back in the 1990s driving home in my little Mini from working late at a local pub. Because the area is so flat, the mist seems to hang in mid air, with everything below and above still visible and it was exactly the height of my windscreen. I had to drive very slowly which at a late hour in the middle of nowhere was very creepy indeed. For Rachel’s characters WW1 comes and the fact that it’s reach extends to such an insignificant place somehow magnifies its impact – you imagine areas where people were carrying on as normal but this reminds us everyone was touched by it, rather like our recent experiences through COVID. Her female characters are two sisters Eleanor and Lily and Eleanor’s childhood friend Clara who is married to their brother Frank. Lily has rarely left the house since her brother died on the night of the port collapse, but for an apparent invalid she has a lot of control over Eleanor. She’s determined that her sister will never leave her. Eleanor wants to leave, she has fallen in love with the new blacksmith. Her day to day maintenance of Lily and the abandoned hospital her father created to treat the port workers is draining. The tension between the sisters builds and then there’s Clara and Frank. Clara wants to help her sister-in-law escape Lily’s control and Frank, an unreasonable and violent man at the best of times, returns from war struggling with a brain injury and PTSD. These two women only have each other and the strength of their loyalty is incredible. My main take away from a writing perspective is to remember that I have a unique voice. No one else has had my experiences or my way of dealing with them. Yes, they seem mundane to me because they’re mine, but to a reader they are completely new. 

Nydia Hetherington – last year I was blown away by Nydia’s novel Sycorax a book I was drawn to thanks to chatting with Nydia on social media after reading her debut novel but also because it features Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Tempest is my favourite play of Shakespeare’s especially since studying it at university and becoming obsessed with Caliban, the play’s ‘monster’. It crossed over beautifully with my Post-Colonial Lit module because there we’d looked at Jonathon Miller’s 1970 production at the Mermaid Theatre. This production leaned heavily on post-colonial themes with two West Indian actors, Norman Beaton as Ariel and Rudolph Walker as Caliban. It depicted Ariel as a house slave who was plotting to take over the island when the colonialists left, by contrast Caliban was a field slave in a much lowlier position. With my specialism in disability literature, Caliban’s description as a ‘savage and deformed slave’ jumped out to me. In disability theory a deformity is used as a ‘narrative prosthesis’, Caliban’s deformity is a crutch, used to show his moral and intellectual inferiority and justifying his enslavement by Prospero. We have to think about the time Shakespeare is writing in and the treatment of people with disabilities, where they were used for entertainment and spectacle or hidden away because they deviate from the white European and abled-bodied ideal. I can’t believe that in this research I didn’t touch on Sycorax. Prospero often speaks of her as a sorcerer he banished from the island and his descriptions of her appearance as monstrous and a hag are there to justify his treatment of her and negates her own power. I was interested in how Nydia used her own experience of rheumatoid arthritis to flesh out this character and give her the story that Prospero denies her in the play. She weaves her own illness into the life of this young girl suffering bouts of extreme joint pain and malaise, gradually becoming bent over as she ages and having to use a stick to walk with. She also has a hand disfigured by fire, but she also has a beauty that men are drawn to and powers they’d like to possess. The juxtaposition of great supernatural power but physical weakness is a powerful one and it creates a fascinating woman who can’t be ignored, as much as she would sometimes like to be. She takes periods of solitude, living very simply and using periods of recuperation to commune with nature and deepen her connection to the earth. She gains wisdom and resilience from battling against the elements in order to survive. I have a chronic illness too and experienced long periods of solitude, particularly during the pandemic. Currently, there is a harmful rhetoric around long term illness and disability that ‘others’ disabled people and blames them for societal problems and I did feel a kinship with this character facing both ableism and the misogyny of men like Prospero. Nydia’s book reminded me that personal experience is a great place to start and that woven with research and imagination it can create something magical and meaningful.

Louise Beech/ Swanson – Louise is a writer who is local to me and I’ve admired her novels for many years now. The first book of hers I absolutely loved was This Is How We Are Human where she writes about a woman caring for her adult son who has autism and other learning difficulties. She is used to providing everything he needs according to a strict daily routine, but one day he comes up with something that stumps her. He wants to experience sex. She’s unsure how to approach this, realising that the world of dating might be too stressful and involves a second person’s feelings and challenges. In the end she takes an unusual decision and hires an escort for her son – it’s interesting to add here that sex is a recognised human need when it comes to assessing a disabled person’s care in some areas of Europe and escort services can be used as part of a care package. I find we’re a lot more squeamish here about sex and disability, although very curious too judging by the amount of people who questioned me when I married a man with physical disabilities. I admired Louise’s bravery in choosing what many see as a taboo subject and managing it with dignity and with a surprising outcome that shows we all make assumptions about people with disabilities. She reminded me that it’s good to write about subjects many people never experience or might be shocked by. Then I read her novel End of Story, a dystopian thriller where fiction novels are banned and writer Fern is suddenly unable to tell stories. She’s followed by grey men in suits who want to be sure she isn’t writing, but joins a resistance movement of women who tell banned bedtime stories to children over the phone. The strangeness of this world is incredibly chilling and she draws us in completely, but something kept nagging at the back of my mind. Something else was going on here. I won’t ruin what this book is about but the twist is incredible and I will admit I cried. This book taught me that we can write about the depths of any human experience, by presenting it in a different place, time or genre and somehow give it even more power. 

Finally there’s her memoir Eighteen Seconds that I devoured and loved for its brutal honesty, bravery and dark sense of humour – something I definitely recognised from my own family. One morning Louise received an awful phone call. Her mother had jumped from the Humber Bridge and despite falling onto a path underneath the bridge, rather than the river, she was alive but very badly injured. Through the lens of this experience Louise tells the story of her childhood and what it is like to be the eldest child of a mother who struggles with her mental health and copes with alcohol. Louise balances this book beautifully. She remembers the experiences she faced as the eldest child of a single mother who couldn’t care for her children and often met men who placed them in genuine danger. Louise was a mum to her younger siblings when she still needed a mother herself. Then there’s the present problem of her mum’s long recovery from her suicide attempt and the difficult balance of being there, but not being dragged back into parenting your own parent. Then there’s the incredible humour the family share in their WhatsApp messages were made me laugh out loud and reminded me of times when my family were sat around my husband’s bed just before he died – at one point watching a crucial Liverpool match. Gallows humour helps and it was inspiring to see personal experiences written in that way. It’s a truth many people don’t realise, that when someone is terminally ill or very badly injured, eventually life carries on. We have to live through the period of loss and still get up every day. It made me think back to the wake we had after my husband’s funeral where everyone had a drink and blew off steam after months of pain and stress. I found my mum down in the garden after midnight throwing smoked salmon from the buffet into the garden pond in order to ‘free the fish’. It was a terrible day but my abiding memory will always be my mum trying to revive a plate of smoked salmon. Louise reinforced the belief in my original memoir, reminding me that my experiences have worth and to tell them exactly as they were, despite fear of judgement and with nothing held back. 

Posted in Personal Purchase

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one.
Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the ‘unadoptable’ girls at the town’s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.

When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister’s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women.

But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences …

In our prologue we find Birdie in the pharmacy of a small town in the southern states of America buying ‘Merry Widows’ condoms by the dozens. I then became so engrossed in the story of this fascinating woman and the relationship she makes with a girl called Meg at the orphanage that I forgot all about the question that came to mind; why she would be buying so many? Thankfully all questions are answered in this incredible book that’s moving, infuriating, saddening and hilarious all at once. The plot takes us on a journey as Birdie travels to visit her newly married sister Frances who is living with her in-laws at their house Idlewilde. Frances is at great pains to point out her new family, the Tartts, are well to do and Birdie must try not to show her up. In truth, Birdie can only ever be her glorious self and Mrs Tartt is too much of a Southern lady to show anything but politeness to a guest. Frances’s husband, Rory Tartt, is a good looking man, but to Birdie he seems to have something on his mind. He’s eager to leave in the morning and eager to be in his office in the evenings, even retiring to his own bedroom at the end of the day and not his wife’s. Frances confides in Birdie that there’s been very little in the bedroom department and Birdie starts to worry. One thing she knows is money and if she didn’t know better she’d be concerned about Rory’s business and where he’s going. When asked to book-keep for the local orphanage Frances again gives her a note of warning. The president of the orphanage board, Mrs Garnett, is very influential and is hoping to be the governor of the Anti-Vice Committee. Birdie is unimpressed with this paragon of virtue and lets Frances do the sucking up, instead she puts her energy into the disgusting room she’s working in alongside one of the orphans, Meg. As far as Birdie can see, Meg is in this room by herself every day away from the other girls. She has nothing to read. The walls are mouldy and she’s not allowed to open the window. She’d think it was a punishment, but Meg doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong. With an attentive adult to clean and paint the room, let the air in and ask her interesting questions Meg starts to blossom, much to Mrs Garnett’s consternation. Birdie can find solutions to most problems and is enjoying her time with Meg, but the Tartt’s troubles loom and Birdie will have to come up with a creative way to help. When she meets Charlie, a woman broken down by the system and longing to get her child back, they make a formidable team. 

I absolutely loved Birdie, the sensible person between an anxious mother who thinks the price of canned peaches will put the family over the edge and a sister who is willing to spend every penny they have if it makes her pretty. She is pragmatic, knowing she’s not a beauty she decided she would have to look after herself and got a job bookkeeping at the local store. Frances didn’t even invite her family to her wedding, scared of being found out as poor. Birdie doesn’t believe in trying to be what you’re not and she’s utterly herself which I loved. She’s sensible but also has a loathing of injustice. She has her own moral compass that is based on the Bible, common sense and kindness. She doesn’t believe in people that set themselves up as good in a performative way, just be good because it’s the right thing to do. Meg was fascinating and her story is so deeply sad. She believes her mother left her one Christmas Eve and never came back, so she had to survive on what was in the house until the local doctor found her. She’s absolutely starving for books and learning, even sneaking a Life magazine she finds in the cupboard and gorging on it like a cream cake. She has to some extent accepted her treatment at the orphanage, never expecting to be chosen as one of the eldest there. I found myself hoping Birdie might adopt her, they certainly have an instant affinity. I loved Meg’s sense of humour too, especially when she relates an adoption letter received that states: 

“We need us an older girl, on account of I was chopping cotton and it was hot out and the blade swung out my hand and sliced my wife’s arm clean off so we had a proper funeral for it but she cannot lift a pot now.”

As Meg observes, they had a funeral for an arm? That’s quite a letter. It has people, action and weather, with a bit of gore for interest. She’s a girl with so much to say and no outlet at all. It’s a whole lot different than life with her mum who was a feminist and clearly loves her daughter. She celebrated when Meg was placed in the ‘exceptional learners’ and tells her to remember that most men are placed in the slow learners category. Where could this woman have gone?

The themes in this are very much like The Help, injustice, inequality, the strength of women and what we’ll do to survive. In addition there’s the rise of the eugenics movement in America, something I researched at university and when preparing for my PhD. Eugenics supposes there is a master race, that white able-bodied heterosexuals with European origins are superior. This is such an important topic when we see what’s going on in the US today and when The Sanctuary exists in London – a destination that stays out of the press, but launched the Restore party, houses a eugenics magazine and race scientists. People forget that Germany didn’t start this lean towards wanting a superior race. Birdie finds out that Mrs Garnett’s policies for the Anti-Vice group include eugenic thinking such as imbeciles will give birth to more imbeciles, some ethnic groups should be prevented from having more children and that others should be forced onto contraception from a very young age, especially girls from poor, black families. It’s an evil that’s never really gone away, especially in America where some of these measures were still happening in the 1970s. These policies made it easy to get inconvenient people out of the way, just like Meg’s mum whose story brought me to tears. Birdie starts to realise that doing something considered immoral by society might be the best way to survive and she has to weigh it up in her own mind.

There was just so much I want to say about this book and I’ve had to stop myself rambling! Kathryn Stockett has done it again. I can see this on the big screen and it will be brilliant. It also has the added bonus of chatter about merkins at the breakfast table, which made me laugh out loud. I fell in love with Meg and Birdie, but also the women who form a team to get Birdie’s in-laws out of the mess they’re in. This book has so much to say about female strength, friendship and adaptability in terrible circumstances. Every character is so well drawn I could see them. I know a lot about eugenics and its history in the US and this is an important book right now, going against where Christian Nationalist policy is taking the country. It shows the damage that can be done when someone lives the rigid rules of manmade religion rather than the actual message of love given in the Bible. Often those who want the appearance of goodness most, will do anything to keep it. Birdie finds that friendship and loyalty can be found in the most unusual circumstances and with people you never expected. There’s tragedy and brutality but also lightness, humour and so much love. Utterly brilliant!

Out now from Penguin Books

Meet the Author

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Calamity Club is her second novel.

Posted in Netgalley

The Jewel Keepers by Sara Sheridan

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Men would kill for this treasure.

The McKenzie women will guard it with their lives.

London, 1837. When 25-year-old Araminta McKenzie-Moore is summoned from Richmond to her great aunt’s deathbed in Edinburgh, it’s the first time she’s met her extended family. The McKenzie women, however, have been keeping a close eye on her. For they have a long, secret and dangerous history as Jewel Keepers to the Scottish Crown and they need Araminta to play her part to solve a puzzle which stretches back generations.

But the McKenzies are not alone in this high-stakes treasure hunt though history. They’re being pursued. The last of her line, if Araminta succeeds, she will uncover something more valuable than mere jewels – a secret that will change the lives of all women living on this, the cusp of the Queen Victoria’s rule.

The plot of this novel is extraordinary, taking historical facts and weaving in the story of a long line of McKenzie women who have fought for the Crown Jewels of the Scottish Royal family, most specifically the Stuart queens. The last Stuart queen was Queen Anne, who died without a direct heir in 1714, to be followed by the Hanoverians. If found, the jewels are meant to be kept safe until a ‘worthy Queen’ sits on the throne and they can be returned to her. The book is set just before the reign of Queen Victoria so this is an important time for their quest. Could she possibly be the worthy Queen they’ve been hoping for? Araminta has had no knowledge of the family history or her role in history until she’s summoned to Edinburgh by her aunt Eilidh McKenzie who lives in a beautiful Georgian house. In the course of one evening, Eilidh hints at the quest ahead, explaining Araminta’s ancestors were Jacobites and clearly also early feminists. A family tree shows that McKenzie women kept their own surname even when married, with a diamond marking out those chosen to safeguard the Queen’s Crown, down the maternal line. Unfortunately Aunt Eilidh dies before she can give Araminta any more clues meaning she faces a complicated task, solving the final clues in a strange city. Added to this quest are a shady male organisation called The Hermits, treacherous servants, dangerous missions and a very feisty nun. 

There are great female characters in this story, especially Araminta who blooms as the story progresses, achieving so much more than she thought possible. She grasps this challenge and runs with it, despite not knowing Scotland and meeting with violence, kidnap and false imprisonment – not to mention a very precarious church roof! It’s great to see that transition where she starts to think for herself: 

‘For years she’s been restrained by teachers, by her position, by other people’s expectations. Now, here, perhaps for the first time in her life she’s free to follow her own judgement.” 

It’s not surprising that she finds this freedom in Edinburgh where she’s informed that even the Bishop was a supporter of women becoming more than wives and mothers. Araminta finds that her powers of deduction are sound and starts to trust herself. She recognises this mission as her chance to grow and test out her capabilities, free from the burden of society’s rules. It’s not a surprise when we learn about her ancestors and especially when she meets with a feisty nun called Sister Winifred, a very intelligent woman who carries a ‘muff gun’ and is quite willing to fight. Even when imprisoned, Araminta finds an ingenious way of escaping her cell that even has a police officer surprised! Apparently no one else has ever thought to try it.

Brodie the butler (and so much more) captured my heart as well. He’s so noble and I loved how even with these smaller characters the author gives so much attention to detail. Brodie doesn’t just have a romantic back story, his night visits to a make shift boxing gym also give his character dimension. Our villain of the piece, Harry Thom, is a vile character. Today he’d be a fully paid up member of the manosphere for sure. He’s got issues with women, but particularly Catholics and the McKenzie women specifically. He’s violent, crafty and will stop at nothing to make sure he beats them in their quest. I loathed him and I was turning the pages desperate for him to have some sort of comeuppance. This is a pacy and tense novel with lots of action scenes and some moments of real danger where you’ll be biting your nails. It has great historical detail too and is bolstered by a fascinating afterword. The quest made me think of Queen Victoria in a different light, she may have been a powerful Queen but was she ever a feminist? Would she be the worthy Queen or was she too wrapped up in portraying the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’ ideal? It seems quite a tame way of ruling when we think back to the Tudor Queens or Mary Queen of Scots and possibly still influences the image cultivated by the Royal Family we have today. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this story and as Araminta raced towards the treasure with Thom in pursuit, I wondered whether it would be what either of them were expecting? 

Out on 14th May from Hodder and Stoughton

Meet the Author

“History is a treasure chest of stories. I love them.”

Sara Sheridan works in a wide range of media and genres but mostly historical and especially the stories of women. She loves exploring where our culture comes from. In 2018 she remapped Scotland according to women’s history. Tipped in Company and GQ magazines, she was nominated for a Young Achiever Award. She has received a Scottish Library Award and has been shortlisted for the Saltire Book Prize and the Wilbur Smith Prize. Her work was included in the David Hume Institute’s Summer Reading list 2019. She has sat on the committee for the Society of Authors in Scotland (where she lives) and on the board of ’26’ the campaign for the importance of words. She took part in 3 ’26 Treasures’ exhibitions at the V&A, London, The National Museum of Scotland and the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. She occasionally blogs for the Guardian about her writing life, the Huffington Post about her activism as a writer and a feminist and puts her hand up to being a ‘twitter evangelist’. From time to time she appears on radio, and has reported for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent from both Tallin and Sharjah. Sara is a member of the Society of Authors and the Historical Writers Association. A self-confessed ‘word nerd’ her favourite book is ‘Water Music’ by TC Boyle. In 2016 she cofounded feminist perfume brand, REEK: artefacts from the project are now held at the National Museums of Scotland and the Glasgow Women’s Library.

Posted in Publisher Proof

Elizabeth and Marilyn by Julie Owen Moylan

Posted on by thelotusreaders

London, October, 1956. A glittering Royal Film Premiere. The whole world is watching . . . 

Tonight, Elizabeth II will formally greet an array of stars. Though she was not born to be Queen, this young mother and wife has embraced her patriotic duty and its unforgiving demands.

A limousine pulls up. Out steps a vision in dazzling gold: Marilyn Monroe. A money-making machine for Hollywood, with curves that drive men wild and a smile that lets women know she’s in on the joke. 

As the two most famous women in the world come face to face, they look to be worlds apart. Yet beneath the glamorous costumes, both are fighting to keep the men they love, while trying to do their work in a man’s world. And they have spent the summer of 1956 battling secret demons the public could never imagine. 

Now, Marilyn steps forward. These photographs will be on the front page of every newspaper in the morning. 

But this isn’t their first meeting. And the story behind the headlines is even more sensational . . .

As soon as I knew that Julie’s next novel was going to feature these two women I was intrigued, because until now the comparison between Hollywood stars and our royal family has been Marilyn and Diana, Princess of Wales. Both were globally famous, incredibly beautiful, hounded by the press and died far too young. This comparison was compounded when Elton John rewrote Candle in the Wind, formerly about Marilyn Monroe, for the late Princess of Wales and played it at her funeral. I was around eight years old when Diana came into public view and I was obsessed for a couple of years with her beautiful dresses and how glamorous it all was, but of course as I grew older her story became more complex and tragic. I think my initial intrigue was due to my age, because to me Queen Elizabeth had always seemed old. This was partly to do with her style I think, but she was in her early fifties (as I am now) when I was taken to the bridge that crosses the River Trent in Keadby, North Lincolnshire to see her car pass by in the silver jubilee year of 1977. I was three and being around for 50 years seemed a million miles away. However, this book focuses on 1956 when the Queen was still a young woman in her twenties and experiencing a very turbulent year. She hadn’t had time to fully settle into her role, she’d had to advise her own sister that she couldn’t marry the man she loved if she wished to remain a princess and her relationship with Prince Phillip had it’s problems. Marilyn was in London to film The Prince and the Showgirl opposite one of our most acclaimed actors, Laurence Olivier. She too was coming into a turbulent phase of her life, after spending some time living in Manhattan and studying the acting ‘method’ theorised by Stanislavski and taught by Strasberg. The idea was to act in a natural way, experiencing what the character is going through, to bring personal emotion and past trauma into the scene, or even stay in character between scenes to keep the intensity in your performance. This was going to prove entirely at odds with Olivier’s way of working. She was also recently married to playwright Arthur Miller, making headlines around the world as the ‘egghead and the hourglass’. The couple came to London in lieu of a honeymoon and were living in a house situated next to the Windsor Castle estate so for a while, the two women were neighbours. The author has taken this background and created a fascinating story about stratospheric levels of fame, how women are treated in the media, and the difficulty of negotiating the line between public and private. 

Each woman has their own narrative and we’re taken inside their deepest fears and emotions. This is incredibly difficult to do with such famous subjects because both women are so iconic and we all have an idea in our heads of what they were like and who they were. I found I couldn’t come to them as new characters straight away, but I did find each woman’s inner voice convincing and engaging. This approach means we get to experience each woman in three different ways: the public face; the private face; and their innermost thoughts. Each has an insecurity about their relationship. Marilyn feels that Arthur does see the real her underneath the persona but fears that he will find the press, the attention from other men and her role as Marilyn Monroe too taxing. Where they would have liked a cute little cottage away from it all to spend their honeymoon alone, they have a huge house with staff and constant requests for photo opportunities. Will Arthur always accept that his wife frequently has to switch Marilyn on? The Queen has had two children with Prince Phillip and now has a very busy public role, while his own is largely undefined. This has left him racketing around town with his Private Secretary Michael, attended a gentleman’s club which has a whiff of scandal about it. The Prince seems very aware of the duality of his wife, but being the Queen means playing that role even within her own family at times. There’s the recent unhappiness with Princess Margaret where Elizabeth the sister wanted to grant her wish to marry Group Captain Pete Townsend, but Elizabeth the Queen couldn’t. Prince Phillip refers to her “Queen Face” and she employs it as a shield so nobody knows what she’s thinking or for when she has to deliver news that family members might dislike. When scandal rears it’s head, the Queen has to think every carefully about how she handles her husband but first and foremost she must protect the crown. Will her relationship suffer because of this? 

Marilyn’s excitement about her new film is tempered by the tone as soon as she arrives to meet Laurence Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh. It seems Leigh has played this role on stage and perhaps hoped to be in the film? It’s hard to read how eager Marilyn is to be with these revered British actors who she sees as the real deal. There’s an incident with Dame Sybil Thorndike at the read through that really does reinforce Marilyn’s ability to switch her star power on and off. It’s a defence mechanism to cover her natural shyness, but also a response to her childhood experiences. It’s clear when she’s bullied on set, her response comes from trauma – the muteness, the stammering and getting her lines wrong. Her past experiences are devastating and we can see them playing out in her work and her relationship with Miller, who she calls ‘Pa’ in private. The author poses the dilemma of each woman being much more famous than their husband and worrying about how to negotiate that imbalance. Marilyn is constantly placed in the middle by the press and her commitments to the film, meaning she’s forced to switch Marilyn on even in private events like a party. Can Miller accept this duality and the constant demands on her time while still seeing the real her? If the Queen makes the decision to act in the way her courtiers advise will Phillip forgive her? If only these women could have known what the other was going through – how impossible it is to be a wife, or a sister and also be a global icon. It made me think of the Queen in a new light and I wondered whether she ever thought of her younger experiences when Diana was globally famous. This is a really interesting read, shedding light on a fascinating time and showing how impossible it is to please everyone, something most women find particularly hard. I was moved by something attributed to the Queen: 

“I want to be something constant to people – beaming out a little ray of light that provides a sort of normality. A kind of ‘if she’s still there doing her duty, then all will be well”

I think she achieved this because her death felt seismic and I think as a country we’ve been all at sea since she died. While politics were in turmoil the Queen was a constant for every generation since my mum who was born in 1953 and also has pictures of Marilyn in her bedroom. Both women have a legacy but only one got to live out her life in full, both publicly and privately. This is a beautifully judged piece of modern historical fiction, getting underneath the skin of women we feel like we knew well but perhaps didn’t know at all. The book goes beyond the facts and lets us wonder how these women could have had insights into each other’s lives. With all the research and sensitivity I’ve come to expect from this author, she has once again captured the mid-20th Century perfectly while also showing us that our modern preoccupations with image and celebrity are perhaps not as new as we thought.

Out Now from Penguin

Meet the Author

Julie Owen Moylan is the author of three novels: That Green Eyed Girl, 73 Dove Street and Circus of Mirrors.

Her debut novel That Green Eyed Girl was a Waterstones’ Welsh Book of the Month and the official runner up for the prestigious Paul Torday Memorial Prize. It was also shortlisted for Best Debut at the Fingerprint Awards and featured at the Hay Festival as one of its TEN AT TEN debuts.

73 Dove Street was recently named as a Waterstones’ Book of the Year and Daily Mail Historical Fiction Book of the Year with the paperback a Waterstones Welsh Book of the month in 2024.

Her writing and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including Sunday Express, The Independent, New Welsh Review and Good Housekeeping.

Elizabeth and Marilyn will be released in April 2026.

Posted in Netgalley

The Repentants by Kate Foster 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

St Monans, Fife, Scotland 1790. Two women are forced to publicly repent in church, one for adultery the other for breaching the sabbath. Wealthy housewife, Florrie, and salt serf, Eliza, form a quick and unusual bond over their mutual humiliation. So when Florrie’s husband decides she must accompany him on a trade venture to Iceland, she insists Eliza comes as her maid.

Far from home, isolated and fearful, the two women grow ever closer. Then Florrie’s husband reveals his sinister plan: he will leave her in Iceland, banished for the shame she has cast upon him. Florrie must escape, but when she turns to Eliza for help she realizes nothing is quite as it seems . . .

Inspired by an attempt by Scottish merchants to annex Iceland as a remote prison for the British Empire, The Repentants is a chilling tale of betrayal, exile and survival

Florrie feels neglected. She has a lovely home, a husband who has inherited a salt works run by several generations of his family and an inheritance of her own as soon as she turns 21. Her husband Jonny has been struggling the burns he incurred by running into fire at work to make sure the building was clear. Florrie knows there is more to marriage than she and Jonny share even before the injury, particularly in the bedroom where he takes no care for her pleasure at all. This restlessness has drives her to back door of the Mermaid Inn in her most alluring dress. Inside and up the back stairs is a room where an Icelandic sailor is waiting for her. For a blissful moment Florrie is finally experiencing something, when the door is flung open and she is discovered. While there’s no criminal punishment for adultery, religion is important in this Scottish community and the minister at the kirk is keen on shaming his penitents. Florrie becomes one of the repentants, wearing sack cloth and standing in front of the congregation facing her neighbours and everything they think about her. It’s humiliating for her and for her husband, so when Jonny lets her know about his plan to spend some months in Iceland she sees it as an escape. With the Icelandic contacts he was introduced to at his gentleman’s club he plans to set up another salt works. However, instead of the serfs he owns in Scotland, the plan is for a ship full of local convicts to serve their hard labour sentences in the salt works. Florrie is determined to go and requests the company of a salt serf called Eliza who was a repentant on the same day. She asks Eliza to be her lady’s maid, but in truth Eliza has no choice since she was signed up as a serf to Jonny’s family as soon as she was born. Underneath the surface though she has spirit and is fiercely independent. With two restless women and a man determined to indenture others for monetary gain, this trip may bring more than any of them expect. 

The story is told from the perspective of three women: Florrie, Eliza and Hallgerd – a woman who is their neighbour in Iceland. Florrie’s narration comes from her journal and there are letters here and there too. What these women share is their experience of misogyny from men who think they have the right to control women through marriage, religion, slavery or just because they believe they have the right to do whatever they want, when they want. Eliza has largely avoided men back home, she lived alone and her repentance was for missing kirk two Sundays in a row. She doesn’t care much what the congregation think of her, because she’s well aware of the hypocrisy of church people. She can’t really be lower in their estimation anyway. As the story unfolds we realise what she’s been doing to survive and who is willing to exploit that knowledge. She was my favourite character because of her inner strength and determination to survive. At the kirk, when she’s asked if she’s scared of the devil she shows her defiance and understanding of her situation: “the devil does not frighten me minister. but men do”. Once she has a plan, she will never tolerate being manipulated, restricted or punished again. Florrie realises as soon as they reach Iceland that this is not going to be an easy way of life and definitely not the standard she had back home. In her journal she reminisces about that morning at the inn where for a brief time she felt desired: 

“The most vivid memory, the one where I am astride him and we are going at it for the second time, pure bliss, I was right.” 

However, her journal isn’t the safe space she thinks it is, her mother read it when she lived at home, Jonny reads it now and he makes sure that others do too. Florrie remembers that beautiful pink dress too, the one that the dressmaker’s assistant said was “whorish”, and its matching wrapper that got lost at the inn. The third repentant that Sunday was a lady called Auld Beatrice and she was there for being a nag. She recognises something in Florrie and warns her to develop her inner life and skills: 

“I hope you are not too reliant on those looks of yours. A woman needs to be resourceful. Or years from now, when you are my age and miserable at how your looks have slid, you will regret not having any other skills.” 

Between Eliza and Beatrice, Florrie gets the message to shrug off shame and realise that she’s only being treated like this because men like to assert their power over women. Deep down Florrie is furious with herself, she’s angry with Jonny for professing such love for her before their marriage then withdrawing it afterwards, but she’s angrier with herself for believing it. Now their home is a small cottage, the weather is bitter and there’s literally nothing – no shops, church, clubs for entertainment. Reykjavik is a busier place but still has only one two storey house that Jonny’s contacts have commandeered as the headquarters of their operation. It was originally the home of Hallgerd their neighbour. She has so many memories of her childhood in that home and hates seeing it used by a man who wants to show his power by having the best house in town. She is surviving alone, while her husband takes jobs on sailing ships and chooses where he sleeps. I loved the blunt and honest way these women talked to each other, fully aware they are the equal of men but having to find ways around their assumed power. It felt like the women and Iceland had many things in common. After stopping over in Copenhagen which is a bustling port, Iceland is a shock to the system. It feels vast and unknowable, but men still think they can use it, tame it and exploit it for profit. Hallgerd is part of the land, she knows it and the power it holds underneath the surface, she can even feel it in her body when a volcano is ready to erupt. The sailors align women with strange abilities, they are scared to have Eliza and Florrie on their ship and give them a bleeding cure in case their menstrual blood attracts sea serpents. It made my blood boil that it was the men who were terrified of a natural process, but it was the women who had to bear the responsibility for that fear. I was reminded so strongly of the Coventry Patmore poem The Angel in the House: 

“A woman is a foreign land

Of which though there he settle young, 

A man will ne’er quite understand 

The custom, politics and tongue.” 

It also reminded me of a recent conversation on X where a man said ‘ I don’t trust something that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die’. Men still fear us and policy is being made on the basis of that fear and the urge to control us. I was hoping that all the women, especially Eliza, would see that the men’s suspicion and fear is the female superpower and she could use it to escape and flourish. Kate Foster has become a must-buy author for me over her four novels because her female characters are so layered and there’s a firm feminist stance as she writes these fascinating characters back into history. She doesn’t just concentrate on one class either, giving us both working and wealthy women and the difference that makes to their journey through life. Most of all her stories grab hold of the reader and are absolutely full of atmosphere. I’ve no doubt she has another hit on her hands with this novel. 

Out 28th May from Mantle Books

Posted in Ten on Tuesday

Ten on Tuesday: Ten Books About Mediums and Fortune Tellers

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Belfast, 1914. Two years after the sinking of the Titanic, high society has become obsessed with spiritualism, attending séances in the hope they might reach their departed loved ones.

William Jackson Crawford is a man of science and a sceptic, but one night with everyone sitting around the circle, voices come to him – seemingly from beyond the veil – placing doubt in his heart and a seed of obsession in his mind. Could the spirits truly be communicating with him or is this one of Kathleen’s parlour tricks gone too far?

Based on the true story of Professor William Jackson Crawford and famed medium Kathleen Goligher, and with a cast of characters including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, The Spirit Engineer conjures a haunted, twisted tale of power, paranoia and one ultimate, inescapable truth… I found this atmospheric, mysterious and completely fascinating.

Paris, 1866. When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house-call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con.

Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution.

Sylvie and Charlotte will need to deploy every trick to terrify the family out of their gold – until they experience inexplicable horrors themselves.

The sisters start to question if they really are at the mercy of a vengeful spirit. And what other deep, dark secrets threaten to come to light…? I loved the genuinely scary scenes in this novel, the setting and the differences between these two sisters.

‘Now you know why you are drawn to me – why your flesh comes creeping to mine, and what it comes for. Let it creep.’ 

Visiting a grim London prison as part of rehabilitative charity work, upper-class suicide survivor Margaret Prior is drawn into the Victorian world of enigmatic spiritualist and inmate Selina Dawes and is persuaded to help her escape.

From the dark heart of a Victorian prison, disgraced spiritualist Selina Dawes weaves an enigmatic spell. Is she a fraud, or a prodigy? By the time it all begins to matter, you’ll find yourself desperately wanting to believe in magic. I love Sarah Waters and the way she writes LGBTQ+ characters back into history, this brought to life the reality of a women’s prison and how class determines women’s lives as much as gender. This was unsettling and like a great thriller you’re never quite sure who is being honest and who is manipulating the outcome.

In the slums of 19th-century New York.

A tattooed mystic fights for her life.

Her survival hangs on the turn of a tarot card.

Powerful, intoxicating and full of suspense. *The Knowing* is a darkly
spellbinding novel about a girl fighting for her survival in the decaying
criminal underworlds.

Whilst working as a living canvas for an abusive tattoo artist, Flora meets Minnie, an enigmatic circus performer who offers her love and refuge in an opulent townhouse, home to the menacing Mr Chester Merton. Flora earns her keep reading tarot cards for his guests whilst struggling to harness her gift, the Knowing – an ability to summon the dead. Caught in a dark love triangle between Minnie and Chester, Flora begins to unravel the secrets inside their house. Then at her first public séance, Flora hears the spirit of a murdered boy prostitute and exposes his killer, setting off a train of events which put her life at risk. This is a fabulous debut novel full of colourful historical detail and showcasing an utterly alternative 19th Century existence.

Viola has an impossible talent. Searching for meaning in her grief, she uses her photography to feel closer to her late father, taking solace from the skills he taught her – and to keep her distance from her husband. But her pictures seem to capture things invisible to the eye . . .

Henriette is a celebrated spirit medium, carrying nothing but her secrets with her as she travels the country. When she meets Viola, a powerful connection is sparked between them – but Victorian society is no place for reckless women.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, invisible threads join Viola and Henriette to another woman who lives in secrecy, hiding her dangerous act of rebellion in plain sight. I was incredibly moved by this story of transgressive love and the fascinating world of spirit photography. Viola has all the naivety of a daughter brought up with religion and it takes Henriette’s boldness for her to try new experiences. I loved the author/‘s use of liminal spaces as places of freedom and how found family can allow that freedom to grow.

England, 1925. Louisa Drew lost her husband in the First World War and her six-year-old twin sons in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Newly re-married and seven months pregnant, Louisa is asked by her employer to travel to Clewer Hall in Sussex where she is to photograph the contents of the house for auction.

She learns Clewer Hall was host to an infamous séance in 1896, and that the lady of the house has asked those who gathered back then to come together once more to recreate the evening. 

When a mysterious child appears on the grounds, Louisa finds herself compelled to investigate and becomes embroiled in the strange happenings of the house. Gradually, she unravels the long-held secrets of the inhabitants and what really happened thirty years before… and discovers her own fate is entwined with that of Clewer Hall’s. This is the perfect book if you enjoy gothic mystery, historical detail and very spooky twists and turns.

Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London’s orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists…

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Hilary Mantel’s supremely suspenseful novel is a masterpiece of dark humour and even darker secrets. This ghostly story is full of menace but also very dark humour. It’s endlessly inventive with all the atmosphere you’d expect from this incredible writer.

How do you solve an unsolvable murder? Ask the victim…

In January 1986, newly-engaged Marnie Driscoll is found dead in her parents’ kitchen. With no witnesses, it seems as though the circumstances of her death will remain a mystery.

Six months later, high-flying Detective Inspector Andrew Joyce’s career takes an unexpected detour when he finds himself unwillingly transferred to an obscure department within Greater Manchester Police, known as the Ballroom. The Ballroom team employs unorthodox methods to crack previously unsolved cases, and Joyce, a sceptic by nature, must find a way to work with Peggy Swan, a reclusive ex-socialite with a unique talent: she can communicate with the dead.

Joyce soon discovers that Marnie’s death, initially dismissed as an opportunistic act of violence, actually seems to be a carefully orchestrated murder. It will take both Joyce’s skill as an investigator and Peggy’s connection to her new ghostly charge to navigate the web of secrets surrounding the case and bring closure to Marnie’s tragic story before the killer can strike again. I love this series, with the author recently releasing the third in the series. This has Northern wit, gritty crime and an exceptional character in Marnie. Apart from Marnie these ghostly goings on are sinister and dark in places, so when added to a new DI with family secrets it really does compel you to read on.

When the women in the Sparrow family reach thirteen, they develop a unique ability. In young Stella’s case, the gift, which is both a blessing and a curse, is the ability to see a person’s probable future. Stella foresees a gruesome murder, and tells her charming, feckless father about it, but it is too late – the murder has already been committed and suspicion falls on him. 

Hoffman unlocks the caskets of family life and the secret history of a community in this magical story about young love and old love, about making choices – usually the wrong ones – about foresight and consequences, all suffused with the haunting scent of roses and wisteria, and the hum of bees on a summer evening. I love the way Hoffman combines mundane every day life with magical events so skilfully you never question it. She draws you into these lives and her setting with all the enchantment of a fairy tale.

A grieving woman . . .
Yorkshire, 1890. Forced to exchange her childhood home for her uncle’s vicarage after a tragic loss, Olwen Malkon finds herself trapped between her aunt’s cruelty and the sinister advances of her cousin.

A troubled past . . .
When Olwen finds herself afflicted by strange dreams of a woman from a distant past, whose fate is overshadowed by menace and betrayal, those around her are determined to dismiss them as hysteria – except the local doctor, John, with whom she develops a connection.

A long-buried secret . . .
As the visions intensify, they begin to mirror reality, threatening to expose chilling secrets. What dangers lie ahead for Olwen, and does the past hold the key to her own future…?

This is the perfect mix of history and the supernatural as the character’s become connected through time. Olwen’s troubled present seems to change her into a conduit for an Anglo-Saxon woman, but her new power to see the past leads to concerns for her welfare in the present. This is really engaging and absorbed me completely.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Unreliable Narrator by Araminta Hall 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

YOUR SECRETS AREN’T SAFE.

Ten years ago, Hope left Somerset with a fatal secret and a broken heart. She has spent a decade in the shadows, living a quiet life of penance to protect the man she once loved – the world-famous author Ambrose Glencourt.

YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

Then, she opens his latest bestseller. To the world, it’s a brilliant work of fiction. To Hope, it’s a betrayal. Every private moment, every dark truth, and every ‘fatal disaster’ from that summer is laid bare on the page.

YOUR TRUTH IS A LIE.

But Ambrose has changed the ending. In his version of the story, Hope isn’t the victim. She’s the villain.

Now, Hope must step out of the shadows to reclaim her narrative. But in a world of glamorous elites and whispered secrets, who will believe the word of an unreliable woman against the word of a literary icon?

Two narrators. One truth. And a secret worth killing for.

I was blown away by Araminta Hall’s last novel, because of how bold and timely it was. I wondered whether she could write something that would capture the world as it is now, crazier and more disturbing by the week. Well it turns out she can. Hope Jenkins takes a job with author Ambrose Glencourt as his personal assistant at his home, Shadowlands. Rosie, as he likes to be called, described the shadowlands as a place of imagination. However, its other meaning gave me a sense of foreboding – a thin place, the hinterland between life and the next, place filled with ghosts and spirits. It made me wonder, was this a place where the line between the real and the imaginary is blurred? The setting is the archetypal bohemian mansion, showing a lot of wear and tear, but still beautiful with idyllic grounds. The sort of place where books and art are piled everywhere, but the dishwasher is held closed with cord and a wooden spoon. Hope is stunned by her surroundings, it’s nothing like her mum’s flat and Rosie’s wife Delia is a fragile beauty who was a model for the artist Siegel when she was younger. Again though, little things stayed in the mind. The way that they call their staff by their Christian names in front of visitors, but Mrs A and B in private seemed odd. Delia seemed very keen to downplay her own artistic ambitions, always saying it’s just a hobby when she has her own studio and Hope can see she’s very talented. Then there’s a painting – in Rosie’s study, amongst the bookshelves he has a nude painting of a very young Delia with her legs wide open. It makes Hope uncomfortable and and she wondered whether that was why he kept it so public, or whether he liked to make other men desire his wife? 

I felt like Hope was dazzled by the Glencourts and the relationship seemed unequal. Whereas staff seemed to stay in the garden and kitchen, Hope and another guest at the house eat and socialise with the couple. Tom is introduced as someone who Delia has worked with when teaching pottery at an outreach for addicts. He and Hope have afternoons to spend together when Rosie has finished working for the day and it’s clear there’s chemistry. Yet I wondered why had Rosie and Delia taken Tom in and what exactly is the nature of their relationship? Is he as taken in as Hope is by this bohemian utopia? Perhaps not, as he discloses more secrets about the couple and explains: 

‘I’m not sure Rosie means everything he says, I think it’s more that he entertains himself by making people feel uncomfortable.” 

Little unexpected touches and comments made me uneasy about Rosie and there’s a very uncomfortable dinner scene that made me feel sick and awkward. Rosie’s dinner guests became horribly familiar, men who think their sex and status gives them licence to manipulate and bully others. We can feel the pressure of that summer building as the heat rises and I was utterly absorbed by it. 

Then we’re taken ten years later and Hope wants to make a statement to the police. We meet our narrator Nat, a young detective trying to get through her day and get home to her wife and kids on time. Nat is our narrator, coming into this ten year old world in our stead and trying to work out whether Hope is just a crank or a mad fan. However, there’s something about this Hope, a strange, sad lady and her journal, from a summer ten years before that catches her attention. This is an utterly different Hope, in fact she’s a woman transformed from that dreamy girl who fell in love with a lifestyle so far from her own. Now she’s working in a school office and doesn’t appear to be looking after herself. She returned home that summer in a state of delirium and shock and it looks like her life hasn’t recovered, although underneath the exterior there’s still a nurturing instinct and an ability to identify victims of abuse. She’s alerted by news of Ambrose Glencourt’s long awaited sequel to The Ruined Girl, his most famous and celebrated novel. Hope buys the first novel and as she reads she becomes more and more angry. This is Rosie’s version of that summer’s events written down for all the world to read and the character based on Hope is definitely the villain of the piece. He has taken the truth and twisted it. The only thing Hope has is her journal and as Nat reads Hope’s journal she does start to wonder whether there’s some truth in this? She’s experienced manipulation and abuse and something about this presses that trigger. She decides to visit Shadowlands for herself and meet the Glencourts, because even if Hope is mistaken about what ended her work with Rosie, something at Shadowlands feels wrong. 

The structure is so complex, playing with stories and asking questions about how they’re told and who gets to tell them. Rosie made my flesh crawl a little, with the arrogant assumption that he can feast on anything to fuel his imagination and continue the important business of making literary art – there’s no downgrading his talent, unlike Delia’s. I really felt how much easier it is to work as a writer when you have money to support you and a mansion to live in. He discards all distractions, even those he’s created himself. I didn’t like his friends either and their little games, enjoying their ability to make someone much younger uncomfortable. Hope wants to be like him, to be able to “make language work that way as if it belonged to me”. What she didn’t realise back then was that there’s no one way to write, because each unique voice is just as valid. It just that certain voices are more likely to be heard because they follow the established narrative. Hopefully, we don’t have to sound like rich, middle aged white men any more. Hope has seen through the shiny exterior of Shadowlands and knows they’ll look down on Nat with her cheap suit and London accent. But could Rosie’s assumption of superiority be his downfall? This book sits perfectly alongside the #MeToo movement and the Epstein Files in that it’s a world operating on the assumption of silence. Hope isn’t silent any longer. Incredibly tense, twisty and timely, I was utterly under its spell from the first few pages. Ambrose Glencourt claims that in fiction “it’s much easier to blow a body apart than put it back together again.” For Hope’s sake I read this voraciously, full of rage and with everything crossed that Araminta Hall could do what Ambrose Glencourt couldn’t.

Out March 5th from MacMillan

Meet the Author

Araminta Hall has worked as a writer, journalist and teacher. Her first novel, Everything & Nothing, was published in 2011 and became a Richard & Judy read that year. Her second, Dot, was published in 2013.

She teaches creative writing at New Writing South in Brighton, where she lives with her husband and three children.

Araminta Hall’s novel Imperfect Women has been adapted for television by AppleTV starring Elizabeth Moss and Kerry Washington

Posted in Netgalley

Introducing Mrs Collins by Rachel Parris

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Charlotte Lucas has never been a romantic. Practical to a fault, she accepted Mr Collins’s proposal with clear eyes and a steady heart, trading passion for security. Life at Hunsford Parsonage may be quiet and predictable, but it is hers to manage – and she’s determined to make the best of it, whatever Elizabeth Bennet may think. 

That is, until an unexpected guest at Rosings Park turns Charlotte’s careful world on its head. He sees her, challenges her – and a spark is lit. But true contentment is not only about who you choose to love, but who you choose to be. For the first time, she wonders: has playing by the rules kept her on the sidelines of her own life?

It is a truth, universally acknowledged that a sick woman in bad humour will be revived in the company of a witty novel…

This is the Pride and Prejudice inspired novel I’ve been waiting for and it came at the perfect time, when I’ve been feeling very unwell and was stuck in bed. I read for two days between sleeping and I swear it kept me sane. I always felt that Lizzie Bennett underestimated her friend Charlotte and I wondered what happened to her and Mr Collins in the future. It’s a great reminder that we only see a novel’s events through the gaze of our narrator and central character. The same events, viewed from a different perspective, bring a more balanced and multi-faceted view of what happened in the novel and its characters. The events of Parris’s novel take place during and after Pride and Prejudice, from the point that Lizzie rejects Mr Collins proposal. A decision that pleases her father but sends her mother into conniptions! Lizzie’s choice means that once Mr Bennett dies, Mrs Bennett and all of her daughters are at the mercy of Mr Collins, the male heir. Whoever he chooses to marry will become mistress of the Bennett’s home Longbourne. Charlotte Lucas is our focus, Lizzie’s best friend and now the recipient of Mr Collins’s attentions. The author has added inserts from the past, adding depth and insight to both Charlotte and Mr Collins’s characters as adults. We see events that we have only imagined, like the Darcy’s wedding at Pemberley and its ensuing drama. However we also see Charlotte settle into the everyday of married life, with all its strangeness and frustrations. I left Pride and Prejudice a little worried about Charlotte, even though the way she does talk about life at the parsonage with humour and optimism when Lizzie visits. So this story of her growing relationships, her new home and her dissatisfactions with her new life is so welcome. What she misses most is passion, but if it arose would she be able to resist it? 

Charlotte is viewed with pity by the Bennetts, apart from Mrs Bennett who is wailing that she will be the mistress of their beloved home. I felt like Charlotte knows her prospects are few. She’s witty and fun, but she knows she doesn’t have the charm and looks of Lizzie. She is someone who people get to know slowly and hasn’t reached her full potential yet. Mr Collins was always a pragmatic choice, but here I could also see it as a mature and confident choice. The Bennetts may see Mr Collins as ridiculous and in some ways he is, but Charlotte doesn’t see her worth as solely defined by the man she chooses to marry. He may be thought of as silly, but that doesn’t mean she is. Also, as Mrs Collins she has a beautiful home and garden, a steady income and a benefactor in Lady Catherine de Bourgh. As a married woman she has status and purpose, going out to visit sick parishioners and keeping the home running smoothly. While Mr Collins is busy Charlotte spends her hours in her library continuing to educate herself, she tends her garden and she practises her piano at Rosings. Charlotte is able to be happy and content in her own company, separate from Mr Collins’s anxieties and emotions. In this light we also see Lizzie differently, perhaps even as a little spoiled. As we see in this book, Mr and Mrs Bennett are the architects of their daughter’s misfortunes and their attitudes are clear in two crucial letters they send to the parsonage. Darcy’s assessment of the family, unwisely passed on to Lizzie during his first proposal, is absolutely correct. Mr and Mrs Bennett’s leniency with their younger daughter’s behaviour allows a window for Mr Wickham to connect with the foolish Lydia. It’s their behaviour that prompts both Darcy and Caroline Bingley to warn Mr Bingley away from his attachment to Jane. In letters to both Charlotte and Mrs Collins, the Bennett parents show they are both fierce in the defence of their daughters but spiteful towards the recipients. Mr Bennett calls Lydia unwise, but at least not judgmental – a criticism that Mr Collins perhaps deserves. However, in a letter to Charlotte Mrs Bennett shows awful spite in an unnecessary postscript: 

“I saw your Maria this week at church and she is become such a beauty! What a pleasant girl – always with a smile and a manner that puts one at ease. You would not think you were sisters.” 

However, I did come away with some forgiveness for Mrs Bennett’s view that Lizzie might have thought of her mother and sisters when she refused Mr Collins, because now they would surely lose their home. It’s clear that Mr Bennett has little respect for his wife and for good reason on some occasions. However, he does favour Lizzie and perhaps his treatment of her has led to Lizzie thinking she has better prospects than she does. Luckily fate brings her Darcy but I did understand Charlotte for thinking that luck just seems to fall into her friend’s lap. 

I felt like Charlotte blossomed in her new environment and that sometimes it is because of Mr Collins not despite him. If nothing else he shows kindness and understanding. The vignettes of his childhood show a sad history that goes some way to understanding his character better. However, it is a connection that she never expected that seems to bring out a new side to Charlotte. An unexpected visitor to Rosings Park brings her friendship and an affinity she never expected, not to mention a passionate spark. I loved the point in the novel when Mr Collins has both a revelation about his wife and is genuinely awe inspired by her. As she plays a piece on the piano for a gathering at Rosings, Mr Collins sees his wife anew: 

“This poised assertive woman was a vision, undaunted by entertaining a room of high-born people in a house such as this with the talent he had no idea she possessed […] she was splendid and her splendour shook the foundation of his peace of mind. Whereas another man might have felt only pride in his wife, for Collins, this feeling was mixed with something much more disquieting. She is beyond me: what he felt was I will not be able to keep her.” 

This is a worry born of never being enough for his father, who tried to change him by whatever means necessary. I felt the author didn’t excuse all of his failings, but explained what was behind them. The narrative voice is so incredibly good that this didn’t feel like a stranger telling me about these characters I knew very well. It felt like a continuation; a meeting with old friends. Of course the author does bring some of our modern thinking to the story, otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing about Mr Collins’s childhood – a psychological aspect to character we wouldn’t perhaps expect in a book pre-Freud. I won’t touch on Charlotte’s eventual fate but I will say that Mr Collins definitely has a part in it. Maybe not in the most romantic sense, but sometimes there’s a kind of love in duty and honour. I love Rachel Parris’s humour and there’s plenty of that here, with the tone and the wit feeling positively Austen-esque. I could tell by how well each character was drawn that the author loved her books and wanted to do them justice. I think she has.

Meet the Author

Rachel Parris is a BAFTA-nominated comedian, musician, actor and improvisor, best known for her viral segments on The Mash Report and Late Night Mash, which have garnered over 100 million views. Her TV appearances include Live at the Apollo, Would I Lie to You?, QI and Mock the Week, and she is a regular guest on Radio 4’s The Now Show and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. She co-hosts the popular podcast How Was It for You? with her husband Marcus Brigstocke. Rachel also wrote and presented a Jane Austen comedy programme, Austensibly Feminist, about how to view Jane Austen as modern feminists. Rachel is a founding member of the critically acclaimed improv comedy group Austentatious, in which the all-star cast invent a play based on a title suggestion from the audience. As a touring comedian she has performed her award-winning musical comedy to sell-out audiences across the UK.