I’m delighted to showcase two second novels published this week (although Song of the Sea Maid has been out for a while in hardback) featuring feisty female characters. Both take a sideways look at history, with a focus on scientific thought either side of Darwin, and celebrate love against the odds. Both stories begin in an asylum (the first a psychiatric hospital, the second an orphanage) and take the reader on an engaging journey beyond its walls.
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We discussed recently on Annecdotal how critics seem set against an angry female character. But Nora’s treatment is a walk in the park compared to that of Ella, a twenty-year-old Yorkshire mill worker in the early years of the last century. When, despairing after toiling in the pale light since the age of eight, the air cloudy with lint and clanking with the noise of the machinery, she breaks a window and runs outside, she’s sent to the asylum on the edge of the moor, with no idea when she’ll be let out. She is admitted by Charles (Dr Fuller to the inmates), whose enthusiasm for his work is filtered through his interest in eugenics and his love of music, which he plays at the Friday night dances. What surprises Ella, and might surprise readers without inside knowledge of these strange Victorian institutions, is that the hospital in which men and women are kept apart by high walls and barred windows, has a magnificent ballroom. It’s there she meets John, a “pauper” from Ireland with (to Dr Fuller’s way of thinking) an extreme reaction to the commonplace tragedy of the death of a child. The burgeoning romance between John and Ella forms the basis of the novel, along with Charles’s doomed attempt to distinguish himself through his work.
With my own WINMP (Work In Not-Much Progress) also set in a long-stay psychiatric hospital (and also with three third-person point of view characters), although eighty years later, I was keen and anxious to read The Ballroom. There was an extra edge for me when I discovered that the asylum, although not named in the novel, is, in all probability one I’ve visited for meetings, now converted into luxury apartments. But in my not unbiased opinion, this is a lovely story of romance in unusual circumstances, as well as the complexities and contradictions that have characterised mental health care since time immemorial. I’d forgotten about the eugenics angle, and was unaware that the underground cells I read about in Playthings was a feature of English hospitals.
While it’s something of a cliché to portray the staff as madder than the patients, this was extremely sensitively done, and the symbiotic relationship between them is something I’ve mentioned before. Even if you’re not interested in the history of psychiatric care, this novel is worth reading for the highly credible characterisation, with a fine balance of strengths and vulnerabilities in just about every one; for the sultry tension and claustrophobia of the summer heatwave; and for the sophisticated exploration of the dynamics of power. As someone who goes stir crazy if she can’t get out for a walk every couple of days, I strongly identified and empathised with Ella’s frustration as she slaves in the laundry while the men at least get to work outside. Although Charles is cast as the villain, I recognised his use and abuse of his work to avoid his own demons. Like the novel Goodhouse, while based on conditions that (fortunately) no longer exist, The Ballroom raises questions about the treatment of those who fail to conform to society’s norms. Thanks to Doubleday for my proof copy.
With my own WINMP (Work In Not-Much Progress) also set in a long-stay psychiatric hospital (and also with three third-person point of view characters), although eighty years later, I was keen and anxious to read The Ballroom. There was an extra edge for me when I discovered that the asylum, although not named in the novel, is, in all probability one I’ve visited for meetings, now converted into luxury apartments. But in my not unbiased opinion, this is a lovely story of romance in unusual circumstances, as well as the complexities and contradictions that have characterised mental health care since time immemorial. I’d forgotten about the eugenics angle, and was unaware that the underground cells I read about in Playthings was a feature of English hospitals.
While it’s something of a cliché to portray the staff as madder than the patients, this was extremely sensitively done, and the symbiotic relationship between them is something I’ve mentioned before. Even if you’re not interested in the history of psychiatric care, this novel is worth reading for the highly credible characterisation, with a fine balance of strengths and vulnerabilities in just about every one; for the sultry tension and claustrophobia of the summer heatwave; and for the sophisticated exploration of the dynamics of power. As someone who goes stir crazy if she can’t get out for a walk every couple of days, I strongly identified and empathised with Ella’s frustration as she slaves in the laundry while the men at least get to work outside. Although Charles is cast as the villain, I recognised his use and abuse of his work to avoid his own demons. Like the novel Goodhouse, while based on conditions that (fortunately) no longer exist, The Ballroom raises questions about the treatment of those who fail to conform to society’s norms. Thanks to Doubleday for my proof copy.
A girl, “more monkey than mankind” (p4), aged anything from three to six years, is brought to a London orphanage with nothing but the filthy rags she stands up in and a scrap of paper given to her by her brother before he was press-ganged into the Navy, and not even a name to call her own. Along with another three dozen foundlings, Dawnay Price, she comes to be known, is given a rudimentary education in numbers and letters, a basic diet of bread and cheese, and prepared for a life in service. When Dawnay steals quills and ink from her benefactor, and teaches herself to write while the other children are asleep, Matron fears she will be banished to the workhouse. But the determined child is rescued by Markham Woods, a bachelor with money to bestow on a deserving case, and assigned a tutor to develop her inquiring mind. At the age of fifteen, or thereabouts, she leaves the asylum to live at the house of her benefactor, where her education continues apace.
Dawnay refuses to be constrained by convention that deems that learning is harmful to women. In an age in which publishers are pilloried (literally, i.e. locked into a wooden framework and exposed to public abuse and ridicule) for printing material at odds with the message of the Bible, she dedicates herself to her research into the origins of life. As a “natural philosopher”, she says (p69):
science is a deity to me. There is no right or wrong when it comes to the truth; there is the fact and fiction, the truth and the error, and little else matters.
Soon her benefactor’s home proves too confining and Dawnay persuades him to let her set sail for Portugal, where she hopes to study the flora and fauna of the Faroe Islands. At the start of the journey, her strong opinions alienate her from the ship’s captain, until her bravery during a violent storm earns his respect, and more. Because of her, he tries a bit of science himself, improving the diet of the sailors to show that scurvy is not, as was previously assumed, due to the degeneracy of the lower classes, the result of idleness or a punishment from God (p99).
On the islands, Dawnay finds true joy in her discoveries, reminiscent of the Margaret Mead character in Lily King’s Euphoria. Yet, in the second half of the eighteenth century, still a hundred years before Darwin, the public is not ready for her mind-blowing conclusions. Earthquake and war cannot distract her from her scientific endeavours, but what about love?
In Dawnay Price, Rebecca Mascull has created a heroic historical female character surpassing even Liza, the adventurer of her debut, The Visitors. You can read her reflections on the challenges of writing Song of the Sea Maid here. Thanks to Hodder Headline for my review copy.
Dawnay refuses to be constrained by convention that deems that learning is harmful to women. In an age in which publishers are pilloried (literally, i.e. locked into a wooden framework and exposed to public abuse and ridicule) for printing material at odds with the message of the Bible, she dedicates herself to her research into the origins of life. As a “natural philosopher”, she says (p69):
science is a deity to me. There is no right or wrong when it comes to the truth; there is the fact and fiction, the truth and the error, and little else matters.
Soon her benefactor’s home proves too confining and Dawnay persuades him to let her set sail for Portugal, where she hopes to study the flora and fauna of the Faroe Islands. At the start of the journey, her strong opinions alienate her from the ship’s captain, until her bravery during a violent storm earns his respect, and more. Because of her, he tries a bit of science himself, improving the diet of the sailors to show that scurvy is not, as was previously assumed, due to the degeneracy of the lower classes, the result of idleness or a punishment from God (p99).
On the islands, Dawnay finds true joy in her discoveries, reminiscent of the Margaret Mead character in Lily King’s Euphoria. Yet, in the second half of the eighteenth century, still a hundred years before Darwin, the public is not ready for her mind-blowing conclusions. Earthquake and war cannot distract her from her scientific endeavours, but what about love?
In Dawnay Price, Rebecca Mascull has created a heroic historical female character surpassing even Liza, the adventurer of her debut, The Visitors. You can read her reflections on the challenges of writing Song of the Sea Maid here. Thanks to Hodder Headline for my review copy.
If you enjoy historical novels with strong female characters, you might also like Elemental and, if you comment on my review before 16 February, you’re in with a chance of winning a free copy.
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