Lianne Dillsworth – She Reads Novels

I enjoyed Lianne Dillsworth’s first novel, Theatre of Marvels, so I was looking forward to her new book, House of Shades, which sounded like an atmospheric Gothic mystery. It turned out to be not quite what I expected, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The setting is London, 1833. Hester Reeves is a young black woman whose mother has recently died, urging Hester to take care of her younger sister, Willa. Unfortunately, Willa already seems to be getting herself into trouble, having caught the eye of Rowland Cherville, the manager of the factory where she works. Rowland is running the factory on behalf of his invalid father, Gervaise, and with the differences in race and social status, Hester is sure his intentions towards her sister are not good. If only Hester and her husband, Jos, could improve their financial situation, then they could move out of the slums of King’s Cross and get Willa away from Rowland’s influence…

Hester’s chance to make some money comes when the local vicar puts her name forward for a job at Tall Trees, home of the elderly Gervaise Cherville, who has a serious medical condition and wants someone to nurse him through it. Hester is considered suitable for the position as she is a ‘doctoress’ – not really a female doctor, as it will still be several decades before the first woman earns her medical degree and even longer for the first black woman to do the same, but someone with a knowledge of herbs and healing potions. However, Hester soon discovers that Mr Cherville has another task in mind for her.

The Chervilles made their fortune through mahogany and they own slaves on a plantation in Honduras. With the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 stating that slavery is to be abolished across most of the British Empire, it seems that Gervaise has developed a conscience and wants to give compensation to his slaves – not the ones in Honduras, though, whom he has never met, but two who once lived at Tall Trees before running away. Aphrodite and Nyx have been missing for many years and Gervaise wants Hester to help track them down so he can make amends.

If you can accept the rather unlikely plot (for a start, is it really believable that a wealthy 19th century gentleman like Gervaise Cherville would bring an unknown young woman from a slum community into his home as a nurse?), this is quite an entertaining novel. Like Dillsworth’s first book, it has a likeable heroine, it’s easy to read and the pages go by surprisingly quickly. There are a few twists, although they’re fairly predictable and I was hoping for one or two more! Apart from Hester herself, most of the other characters lack depth and nuance – there’s no real explanation for why Rowland is such a wicked person with seemingly no redeeming qualities at all, and we don’t see much of Willa’s good side either, which makes it difficult to understand why Hester views her as such a beloved sister, putting her needs above those of herself and her husband.

The most interesting aspect of the book is Gervaise Cherville’s desire for atonement and his attempt to make reparations for the harm he has caused. It seems clear that, at least at first, Cherville’s main motive is to assuage his own guilt, but Hester reflects that “maybe when it came down to it, all apologies were like that, even when they were heartfelt.” I would have liked more depth here as well, but maybe that would have been difficult as the whole novel is narrated by Hester and we never get inside Cherville’s head to see what he’s really thinking or whether his feelings are genuine.

House of Shades is a book with lots of good ideas and interesting themes, but I struggled to get past the implausibility of the plot and on the whole I preferred Lianne Dillsworth’s first book.

Thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 32/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

When the audience take their seats at Crillick’s Variety Theatre looking forward to an evening of entertainment featuring the Great Amazonia, a ‘savage queen’ captured in Africa, little do they know the act is a fraud. The ‘Great Amazonia’ is actually Zillah, a young mixed-race Londoner who has never been to Africa in her life. Zillah can see nothing wrong with what she is doing; she enjoys being the headline act, she’s being paid for her work and she’s making some powerful new friends, among them Vincent, Viscount Woodward, who is setting her up as his mistress. It’s not until she meets Lucien Winters, an African merchant and former slave, that she begins to question her actions and wonder whether there is a better life she could be leading.

Then, her manager Marcus Crillick unveils a new act – the ‘Leopard Lady’ – and Zillah’s eyes are opened to the full extent of Crillick’s cruelty and the way she and others are being exploited for financial gain. When the Leopard Lady goes missing, Zillah becomes convinced that she is being held captive somewhere and sets out to search for her – a search that will take her across Victorian London, from the bustling dockyards to the slums of St Giles and the elegant parlours of the upper classes. Meanwhile Zillah must choose between Vincent and Lucien and decide how she wants her future to unfold.

I enjoyed Theatre of Marvels, although it did seem very similiar at first to Elizabeth Macneal’s Circus of Wonders, another novel about the exploitation of ‘circus attractions’. However, this one is written from a very different perspective, allowing Lianne Dillsworth to explore different themes such as racial and class inequality and slavery. The thousands of black and mixed race people who lived in Victorian London are often ignored in fiction set in that period, but Dillsworth gives them a voice here through the characters of Zillah, Lucien and others. Zillah is a particularly interesting heroine as she is clearly struggling with her identity throughout the novel, feeling that she doesn’t truly fit in with one community or the other and trying to decide who she is and what she wants.

Although I felt that some of the characters, particularly the villain Marcus Crillick and Zillah’s friend and rival Ellen, were too thinly drawn, there were others I found much more interesting. I was intrigued by Vincent Woodward, as there were times when I thought he must genuinely care about Zillah, but I doubted from the beginning that he would have the courage to defy convention and commit to a future with her. I could only see their relationship ending unhappily. On the other hand, Lucien seemed to have a deeper understanding of Zillah and much more personal integrity, yet I never really managed to warm to him. However, I thought I had predicted how the story would end and was taken by surprise because it wasn’t quite what I’d expected!

While I would have liked to have seen more of the Leopard Lady and to have heard some of her story from her own point of view, I did enjoy getting to know Zillah. This was an absorbing and surprisingly quick read and I’ll be looking out for more books from Lianne Dillsworth.

Theatre of Marvels is published in the UK on Thursday 28th April 2022. Thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.