Tag: 19th century

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

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It’s 1809 and a wounded man is being carried into his home in Somerset. His name is Captain John Lacroix and he has just returned from Spain, where he has been fighting in the Peninsular War. Injured, exhausted and haunted by his experiences, he seems close to death, but with the help of his housekeeper, Nell, he slowly regains his strength. Unable to contemplate returning to the war, he sets off for Scotland instead – first to Glasgow, then to the Hebrides, in search of some peace and redemption.

Meanwhile, in Spain, a British soldier called Calley is providing evidence to a military inquiry regarding atrocities carried out in the Spanish village of Los Morales during the retreat of the British army. He says he can identify the man responsible for this war crime, the man who was in command of the troops as they raped and murdered. To satisfy the Spanish that justice has been done, Calley is sent to hunt down and punish the perpetrator of the crime, accompanied by a Spanish officer, Medina, who will act as a witness.

Due to the alternating of the two narratives, it very quickly becomes obvious to the reader that the man accused by Calley is John Lacroix…but can it be true? Can the quiet, decent, sensitive man we have been getting to know on his journey to Scotland really have carried out these appalling deeds? Either there is more to the story than meets the eye or we don’t know John Lacroix as well as we think we do. There’s plenty of suspense as we wonder when we will find out exactly what happened that day in Los Morales and what sort of man John Lacroix really is.

As we wait to see whether Calley and Medina will catch up with their target, Lacroix arrives on a remote Hebridean island where he meets Emily Frend and her siblings, Jane and Cornelius. Together with their absent leader, the mysterious Thorpe, they are the last remaining members of a small community who have made the island their home. Intrigued by their lifestyle, Lacroix compliments Emily on her freedom, only for her to explain to him that she does not consider herself to be free at all: “Is it because I take off my stockings to paddle in the sea?” she asks. “That I have let you see me do it? Is that my freedom?”

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a beautifully written novel and although there were one or two aspects of the plot that I found unconvincing and although I was disappointed in the Hebridean setting, which I would have expected to have a much stronger sense of place, I could overlook these things because there was so much else that I liked. Andrew Miller has a lot to say about so many things: guilt and blame, the atrocities of war, independence, redemption and love. This is only the second book of his that I’ve read – the first was Pure, a dark and fascinating novel about the destruction of a cemetery in Paris. I enjoyed both but preferred this one because the characters are stronger and because it left me with more to think about at the end. I’m sure I’ll be reading more of his books; I like the sound of Ingenious Pain, so maybe I’ll try that one next.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry

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The Way of All Flesh is the first in a new historical mystery series written by husband and wife team Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry. Brookmyre is an established crime novelist, while Haetzman is a consultant anaesthetist with a Master’s in the History of Medicine – the perfect combination when writing a crime novel set in the medical world!

It’s 1847 and young medical student Will Raven has secured a position as apprentice to the renowned Scottish obstetrician Dr James Simpson. Simpson is one of Edinburgh’s leading doctors and Raven intends to make the most of this wonderful opportunity to gain experience in the fields of midwifery and anaesthesia. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get off to the best of starts: just before he is due to begin his apprenticeship he discovers the dead body of his friend Evie, a prostitute whom he has being trying to help financially. Stumbling away through the dark streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town, he is attacked by a gang sent after him by a moneylender and turns up battered and bruised for his first day at work – definitely not the impression he had hoped to give!

Settling into his work with Dr Simpson and his colleagues, Raven is required to assist at some difficult births and quickly comes to appreciate the role ether can play in easing the pain of childbirth. During his visits to other households, and in his conversations with other doctors, Raven begins to hear about other women from the Old Town who have been found dead, like Evie, under suspicious circumstances. Determined to find out what really happened to Evie, he decides to investigate…

But this is not just Raven’s story. We also meet Sarah Fisher, Dr Simpson’s housemaid. Sarah is an intelligent young woman who would love to have the opportunities that have been given to Will Raven, but as a career in medicine is not available to her because of her gender and class, she has to resign herself to reading the doctor’s medical books and helping out in his clinic as much as she can. Sarah and Will take an instant dislike to each other, but as they continue to work together – not just in the same household, but also to track down the murderer – they begin to find some common ground.

The Way of All Flesh is a fascinating read for anyone who is interested, as I am, in the history of medicine. Some of the doctors and scientists who appear in the book, including James Simpson, are real historical figures and the novel recreates some of the experiments, discoveries and research that led to the development of anaesthetics, as well as some of the challenges they faced – such as the opposition of the Scottish church leaders, who believed it was natural for women to feel pain in childbirth and that using drugs to relieve it was against the will of God. Remembering that one of the authors of this book is an anaesthetist herself, everything feels very authentic and convincing. I should warn you, though, that the descriptions of childbirth and other medical cases and operations are very detailed and occasionally a bit gruesome!

It was actually the crime element which was the least successful aspect of the book for me. I felt that it took second place to the medical procedures and scientific discussions and after a while I lost track of who had been killed and what the circumstances were; it just wasn’t the sort of mystery I prefer, where I find myself looking for clues and trying to guess who the culprit could be. The setting makes up for it, though – the descriptions of Victorian Edinburgh are wonderfully atmospheric.

Although I thought the secondary characters could have been given more depth, I did enjoy getting to know both Will Raven and Sarah Fisher. This was a promising start to a new series and I will be looking out for the second book.

This is book 13/20 of my 20 Books of Summer.

Thanks to Canongate Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Rosalind Laker: Warwyck’s Wife and Claudine’s Daughter

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At the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard sells his wife at an auction, an impulsive act which he later regrets and which haunts him for the rest of his life. This horribly cruel and barbaric custom really did take place in England between the 17th and 19th centuries. Rosalind Laker’s 1978 novel Warwyck’s Wife – the first in a trilogy – opens with a similar scene in which a farmer puts his unwanted wife Kate up for auction at a market in Brighton, parading her in front of the crowd with a halter round her neck like an animal.

Among the men who decide to bid for Kate are nineteen-year-old Harry Warwyck and his older brother Daniel. Harry has the best of motives – he has fallen in love at first sight and wants to prevent Kate from being bought by someone who will treat her badly – but Daniel has seen an opportunity to obtain the wife he needs in order to claim his inheritance, Warwyck Manor. To Harry’s disappointment, it is Daniel who is successful…but will he be happy with his new purchase? It’s not the most pleasant or uplifting start to a novel, but Rosalind Laker does a good job of conveying the shame and degradation Kate feels because of her husband’s actions combined with relief at being released from her unhappy marriage and given the chance to start a new life.

Warwyck’s Wife is described as a romance, but there’s certainly nothing very romantic, in my opinion, about the relationship between Daniel and Kate. Daniel makes it clear at the beginning that he wants Kate only because he believes she can be useful to him, and although his feelings for her do begin to change, he is too obsessed with another woman – Claudine Clayton – to appreciate what he has in Kate. Daniel is a thoroughly unlikeable character, actually: he uses and discards Kate as it suits him; he hides the truth from Claudine; and the way he behaves towards Harry is hardly very brotherly either. Not my idea of a romantic hero – not that every book really needs a hero, of course. Kate, on the other hand, is a lovely person, although her devotion to the undeserving Daniel really frustrated me and I couldn’t understand how she could possibly have preferred him to Harry!

Luckily, there is a lot more to this novel than the ‘romance’. Another major part of the plot involves Daniel’s career as a boxer and his ambition to become a champion prize-fighter. The novel is set in 1826, during the reign of George IV, and although I have no interest in boxing in its modern form, I did find it interesting to read about Daniel’s preparation for his fights (or ‘mills’ as they were called), the hours of practice he puts in with his trainer, Jem Pierce, and the spectacle of the mills themselves, which attracted large crowds and were sometimes held illegally, at risk of being stopped by the local magistrate. It seemed a much more violent and chaotic sport than its modern equivalent too, unsurprisingly with little regard for the health and safety of the participants.

There is also a storyline involving Daniel’s plans to develop the little coastal village of Easthampton into a seaside resort similar to Brighton. As you can imagine, this causes a lot of conflict as the scheme meets support from some of the villagers but fierce opposition from others as new workers are brought in to carry out the construction work while existing businesses find themselves under threat. This subplot gives the author a chance to highlight social injustices and the difference in attitude between Kate and Daniel, as Kate does everything she can to improve the working conditions of the builders, masons and labourers while Daniel cares only about money and productivity.

Warwyck’s Wife is not a perfect novel but I found more to like than to dislike and went straight on to read the sequel, Claudine’s Daughter.

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Claudine’s Daughter begins about twenty years after the previous book ends and introduces us to Lucy di Castelloni, Claudine Clayton’s daughter. Lucy has lived in Italy all her life and was married off at an early age to a much older man. Now, following her husband’s death, she has decided to come to England to see where her parents grew up and to find out whatever she can about her family and her origins. Arriving in the town of Easthampton, she quickly catches the eye of three very different men. The first is Richard Warwyck, Daniel’s son; the second is Timothy Attwood, who is distantly related to Lucy’s family; and the third is Josh Barton, who has ambitious plans that could affect the future of everyone in Easthampton.

Although this is very much the story of Lucy and the other ‘second generation’ characters, some of the characters from Warwyck’s Wife appear again too, including Daniel, Kate, and (very briefly) Harry. There’s also a new set of secondary characters: Emmie, the landlady of the house where Lucy takes lodgings; her daughter Meg; and Meg’s lover, a local fisherman. Lucy’s romantic entanglements form a large part of the novel but, like the first book, it is more than just a romance. It’s also a story about the uncovering of family secrets – and while the reader already knows what these secrets are (assuming we have read the first book in the trilogy), Lucy and most of the other characters do not. This means the plot is quite predictable, but the interest is in waiting to see how and when the truth will be revealed.

The most interesting aspect of the book, for me, was seeing how Easthampton, which was only a small village in Warwyck’s Wife, has grown into a thriving resort with piers, pavilions, hotels and theatres. A source of conflict throughout the novel is the question of whether or not the town should be connected to the railway network. Richard Warwyck is in favour as it will allow the area to develop further, but Daniel (whom I still found impossible to warm to) doesn’t like the idea of opening up access to the resort to large numbers of working class people and destroying the select atmosphere.

There is a third novel about the family – The Warwycks of Easthampton – but I don’t own a copy of that one yet and I think I’ve read enough about the Warwycks for now. Maybe I will read it at some point, but there are other books by Rosalind Laker that sound more appealing to me at the moment.

Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks

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As someone who loves the work of all three Brontë sisters, I have been interested in reading Dark Quartet for a long time. I have read some more recent fictional accounts of the Brontës’ lives and work, such as Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow and Robert Edric’s Sanctuary, but this is an older book, first published in 1976, and I was curious to see what it was like.

Lynne Reid Banks’ novel tells the story of Charlotte, Emily and Anne – and their brother, Branwell, who makes the fourth of the ‘quartet’. It begins with the Brontës growing up at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire in the care of their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, and their Aunt Elizabeth, who helps to raise them following the early death of their mother. The four children are very close, with particularly strong bonds between Charlotte and Branwell and between Emily and Anne, who entertain themselves by writing stories set in the fictional worlds of Angria and Gondal. There are also two elder Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who die of tuberculosis early in the novel while attending Cowan Bridge School along with Charlotte and Emily.

As the three surviving girls reach adulthood, they find work as teachers and governesses, with varying levels of success, but they each continue to write, drawing inspiration from their experiences and surroundings. As Branwell, having suffered a series of disappointments and setbacks, descends into alcoholism and drug addiction, his sisters go on to achieve their ambition of becoming published authors, albeit under male pseudonyms.

I have given a very brief summary of the plot here, but I think that’s enough. If you’re already familiar with the Brontës’ lives and work, you won’t need me to go into any more detail; if not, and if you’re planning to read Dark Quartet, I’m sure you’ll prefer to have a few things left to discover for yourself. Banks does stick closely to the facts, but it’s important to remember two things: first, however biographical this book may feel, it is a work of fiction; and second, a lot of research into the Brontës has taken place since the book was written, so interpretations and opinions will have changed in that time. As the author says in the foreword to the novel:

…I have not let my imagination run riot. I have kept it harnessed to the truth. For the rest, I offer my answers to some of the mysteries.

Probably the most controversial area of the book is the portrayal of Branwell, particularly a scene, which was presumably invented, in which he meets a group of Irish labourers in a tavern. I saw this scene, and what happens in it, as the author’s way of providing an additional explanation for Branwell’s sense of hopelessness and disillusionment with himself and his life, so I accepted this as her ‘answer to one of the mysteries’, but I suppose it depends on how far you think a biographical novel should deviate from historical fact. For the rest of her treatment of Branwell, Banks acknowledges Daphne du Maurier, who wrote The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, as one of her sources and, like du Maurier, she clearly has some sympathy for Branwell. He is a frustrating and infuriating character who wastes every opportunity he is given, but he is often his own worst enemy, and his story, as it is told here, is quite sad.

Of the three sisters, Charlotte is given far more attention than either Emily or Anne, but this is usually the case in books about the Brontës and I can understand why. Charlotte lived longer than the others, she had more of her writing published (four novels as opposed to Anne’s two and Emily’s one), and her life was more closely documented – she was the subject of a biography by Elizabeth Gaskell in the 19th century. However, I find Emily – solitary, independent and intensely private – a much more intriguing personality and I would have preferred to have spent more time with her and with Anne rather than Charlotte.

Lynne Reid Banks doesn’t explore the Brontës’ novels in much depth, but I think she does a good job of showing how the sisters’ work was influenced by people, places and events from their personal lives. Cowan Bridge School, with its damp, unhealthy location, inadequate food and strict discipline, was the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre; the badly behaved children in the households where Anne serves as governess find their way into Agnes Grey; and Emily’s beloved Yorkshire moors become the setting for Wuthering Heights. There are also several chapters devoted to Charlotte’s time as a teacher in Brussels, which will be familiar to anyone who has read Villette or The Professor.

Dark Quartet has recently been made available in a new ebook edition from Sapere Books and I was delighted to receive a copy for review through NetGalley a few weeks ago. I really enjoyed reading it and, although my favourite Brontës are no longer living by the end of the novel, I am still tempted to read the sequel, Path to the Silent Country, about Charlotte’s final years.

Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy

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Desperate Remedies (1871) was Thomas Hardy’s first published novel, following an earlier manuscript which failed to find a publisher and was later destroyed. I love Thomas Hardy’s books and have been looking forward to reading this one as it has been described as a sensation novel, a genre of Victorian fiction that I’ve enjoyed since I first discovered authors like Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood, in the years before I started my blog.

At the beginning of the novel, we learn that our heroine, Cytherea Graye, was named after her father’s one true love, a woman who disappeared without explanation and left him heartbroken. Mr Graye later married and had two children – Cytherea and her brother Owen – whom he raised alone after his wife’s death. When Mr Graye himself dies, having made some poor business decisions in the final years of his life, Cytherea and Owen are faced with making their own way in the world. Owen decides to pursue a career as an architect, while his sister advertises for work as a governess.

Finding it harder to get a job than she had expected, Cytherea eventually accepts a position as lady’s maid to Miss Aldclyffe, a middle-aged unmarried woman who seems to be hiding a number of secrets. Why does she have so much affection for Cytherea, whom she has never met until now? Why does she go to such great lengths to employ the mysterious Aeneas Manston as steward on her estate – and why is she so keen to encourage Cytherea to marry him? Manston is another person with secrets and Cytherea is reluctant to marry someone she feels she can’t fully trust, especially as she has already fallen in love with Edward Springrove, her brother’s friend. Unfortunately, Edward is engaged to another woman – and when Cytherea’s financial situation becomes increasingly desperate, she finds herself drawn into Aeneas Manston’s schemes.

I loved Desperate Remedies! It starts off slowly, introducing Cytherea and her family background and explaining the circumstances that lead to her arrival at Miss Aldclyffe’s house, but it quickly develops into an intriguing and entertaining page-turner with plenty of twists and surprises. I liked Cytherea; there are stronger, more interesting heroines in some of Hardy’s later novels, but Cytherea is by no means a weak and helpless woman and I enjoyed following her story.

I did find two of the novel’s big secrets quite easy to guess, but there were still times when I wasn’t sure where the story was going and when the actions of one character or another left me mystified. The plot makes it feel quite similar to a Wilkie Collins novel, but there are still some elements which make it recognisable as a book written by Thomas Hardy, such as the descriptions of the landscape and the portrayal of a small rural community. This isn’t one of my absolute favourite Hardy novels – I think some of his later ones are better – but it’s still a great read.

The remaining novels I have left to read by Hardy are all books that I know nothing about: The Well-Beloved, Two on a Tower, A Laodicean, The Hand of Ethelberta and The Trumpet-Major. Does anyone have any recommendations from those five? I also haven’t read any of his short story collections, Wessex Tales, Life’s Little Ironies and A Group of Noble Dames, so I still have lots of Hardy to look forward to.

This is book 4/20 of my 20 Books of Summer and book 6/50 from my second Classics Club list.

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

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I love Anthony Trollope’s books, but sometimes I need to be pushed into picking them up; I know I’m going to enjoy them, but they are all so long and, once you start reading and become caught up in the lives of the characters, so intense, that I really have to be in the right mood before starting one. As I have already read the first four books in the Palliser series, I added the last two – The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children – to my Classics Club list to ensure that I got to them sooner rather than later.

The Prime Minister is the fifth in the series and, as predicted, once I got into it I loved it. It had been a while since I read the previous novel, Phineas Redux, (two years, in fact) but that didn’t matter at all – yes, we are reunited with some old friends, but there are new characters and new storylines too, so it wasn’t really necessary to be able to remember everything that happened in the last book. One of those new characters is Ferdinand Lopez, a handsome, charismatic adventurer, thought to be of Portuguese-Jewish descent, who sets his sights on marrying Emily Wharton, the daughter of a wealthy London lawyer.

Emily is in love with Lopez, but Mr Wharton is not at all happy at the prospect of having him as his son-in-law. He has always hoped to see Emily marry her friend Arthur Fletcher, whose family have connections with the Whartons. However, as his main objection to Lopez as a suitor is based on the fact that he is not an Englishman and nobody knows who his parents are, Mr Wharton eventually agrees to let Emily choose her own husband. Will she be happy with her choice or will she end up regretting her decision?

Ferdinand Lopez is a wonderful character; it is obvious from the start that he is going to be the villain of the novel, but we don’t know exactly what form his villainy will take. Watching him plot and scheme as he tries to make himself rich and rise up the social ladder is what drives the story forward. It’s disappointing, from a modern day perspective, that Ferdinand’s background is seen as one of the factors against him, but of course it’s realistic that a conservative, conventional Victorian gentleman like Mr Wharton would have held those views. Anyway, he is much more interesting to read about than Emily’s other love interest, the likeable, socially acceptable but slightly boring Arthur Fletcher. The relationship between the three of them reminded me of the two similar storylines in the first Palliser novel, Can You Forgive Her?

But this book is called The Prime Minister and so far I haven’t mentioned the title character at all! He is a man we already know from the previous books in the series: Plantagenet Palliser, who has recently inherited the title of Duke of Omnium. With neither main political party able to form a government on their own, a coalition has been formed and Plantagenet has been made Prime Minister, mainly because no one else is considered suitable. And Plantagenet is not entirely suitable either; he is an honest, dignified, principled man but lacks the ruthlessness and the leadership skills that are needed in his new job.

The Duchess of Omnium – formerly Lady Glencora Palliser – is much happier in her role as Prime Minister’s wife than Plantagenet is in his as Prime Minister! In some ways she has a better understanding of politics than he does, but their very different methods of dealing with their new position in the world lead to some conflict and tension in their marriage – particularly when Ferdinand Lopez arrives at one of Glencora’s parties hoping to be shown some favour by the new Prime Minister.

Both stories – the story of Emily and her husband and the story of the Prime Minister – are interesting and compelling. Although it was published in 1876 some aspects of the plot still have a lot of relevance today, such as the power of the press and the integrity of politicians being called into question. This is one of my favourite books in the Palliser series and I’m now looking forward to reading the final one, The Duke’s Children.

This is book 4/50 from my second Classics Club list.

Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry

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Church of Marvels, published in 2015, is Leslie Parry’s first and, so far, her only novel but I enjoyed it so much I hope she will be writing more. It’s a dark, complex and unusual story set in New York City in 1895 and, despite comparisons with The Night Circus, I think it’s a very different sort of book.

There are three main characters to get to know. First there’s Sylvan Threadgill, a ‘night-soil collector’ who makes his living from cleaning privies, as well as fighting in the occasional amateur boxing match. One night, Sylvan finds a newborn baby girl who has been abandoned and left to lie in the dirt of the street. He rescues the baby and, as an orphan himself, resolves to find out what has happened to her parents.

Next, there’s Odile Church, who performs in a Coney Island sideshow as the girl on the wheel of death – spinning in circles as a blindfolded man throws knives in her direction. Odile is trying to come to terms with the tragic death of her mother in a fire and the disappearance of her twin sister Belle, a sword-swallower and contortionist, who has run away to Manhattan with no explanation. Worried about her sister’s state of mind, Odile decides it’s time to go and look for her.

Finally, we meet Alphie, an undertaker’s wife, who has found herself imprisoned in Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum. She can’t remember how she came to be there, but she’s sure it’s part of a plot dreamed up by her mother-in-law who has never liked her and wants her out of her son’s life.

At first these felt like three completely separate storylines and I couldn’t see how they could be connected in any way. Of course they do eventually come together and then I could appreciate how cleverly structured the whole novel is, with things being revealed only when we really need to know them and the biggest plot twists kept until near the end of the book. For this reason, I can’t discuss some of the most intriguing aspects of the novel, but I will say that there is a lot going on and that there is much more to each of the characters above than meets the eye!

The circus element, which is probably one of the things that draws a lot of readers to this novel, is actually a fairly small part of the story and only a few scenes are set at Coney Island. Most of the action takes place in New York and, more specifically, in the dark side of New York, a world of asylums, opium dens and underground tunnels. The people who populate these dark and unpleasant places are those who are considered to be social outcasts; misfits; men, women and children who are ‘different’ in some way. Odile, Belle, Sylvan and Alphie all fit into this category and I had a lot of sympathy for each of them – life has not been easy for them and all they want is to have a chance of happiness.

Although it is certainly not the most cheerful or uplifting of novels, I found Church of Marvels a fascinating read and, as I’ve said, I would love to read more by Leslie Parry.